2025 Global Forum

Maeve O’Rourke, Assistant Professor of Human Rights at the University of Galway, legal adviser to the Justice for Magdalenes Research group and winner of the PILnet Local Pro Bono Impact Award in 2018, shares her thoughts on the challenges, opportunities and rewards of movement lawyering.

How can Big Law help the environment? Seth Kerschner, partner at White & Case, in conversation with Gabriela Christian-Hare, CEO of the Australia Pro Bono Centre, will attempt to answer this question. Together, they will explore the opportunities, controversies and challenges confronting law firms seeking to address climate change, including law firm sustainability programs, pro bono legal work, and conflicts of interest, as well as specific examples to illustrate Big Law’s involvement in tackling the climate crisis.

Drawing from successful social justice movements led by affected communities, the session will share lessons in building partnerships with refugee communities and their allies that center their leadership and experience. Participants will be provided with tools to reflect and improve on their own pro bono partnership practices with affected communities towards greater equity, sustainability and impact.

This session will explore collaborations between law schools and NGOs, specifically how students in law school clinics, students doing summer internships. and graduates with fellowship funding can support the work of organizations anywhere in the world, while the students and graduates also acquire valuable experience.  The session will share examples of impactful work that students and graduates have done, explain about internship and fellowship funding, and also address issues such as cultural competency and ethics.

In an initial interview, JP Douglas-Henry, Managing Director, Sustainability & Resilience, DLA Piper, will be interviewed by Jacquelyn MacLennan, White & Case Partner and Global Pro Bono Practice Leader, on the ESG macro trends reshaping the business world and how these trends create threats and opportunities in the legal sector. How does the concept of creating shared value and changing expectations about the role of business within society shape operations of the business and especially law firms?

Following up on the high-level interview, a panel conversation between three partners who lead their firms’ respective pro bono practices will explore how these macro trends we are witnessing around the world have and will continue to impact pro bono, skilled volunteering, corporate social responsibility and public interest work more broadly. The conversation will probe different ways that law firms engage with society and how it may be impacted by ESG.

What are the key ingredients for effective pro bono lawyering in favor of children’s rights? What good practices can be shared by NGOs, law firms and clearinghouses for the development of pro bono initiatives? How can we meaningfully include children in this conversation? This session is framed to answer these questions by showcasing the process of creation of the CLEAR-Rights European and Romanian Child Justice Clearinghouse and other models of pro bono partnerships in the field of child justice.

Sponsored by:

CLEAR-Rights is co-funded by the Justice Programme of the European Union (2014-2020)

The complex matrixes of multi-stakeholder pro bono engagement throughout Latin America have proven to be extremely effective in finding legal solutions to a broad range of human rights issues, including: the preservation of democratic institutions, criminal justice, immigration, gender-based violence, sexual education/freedom of speech, and indigenous rights. Panelists will share examples of successful partnerships in these areas.

Continuing the conversation from the “How Will ESG Change the Way Law Firms Engage with Society?” session,  the objective of this roundtable is to discuss, from a practical perspective, the different views on how (if so) ESG is impacting the pro bono practices at law firms, the challenges faced and lessons learnt on experiences so far, which would no doubt be beneficial for both those experienced in the audience, and those less familiar with ESG.

The role for lawyers in post-conflict peacebuilding panel discussion will explore the journey to peace in Northern Ireland; the legal frameworks underpinning its security; and the role of law and society in safeguarding its fragility.

This session will focus on showcasing the work of Refugee Law Project in providing legal aid to Forced Migrants In Uganda. Panelists will also focus on how strategic litigation has been used to seek redress on issues affecting refugees in Uganda. Join us to learn about best practices on what interventions have enabled the most indigent to access justice amidst other existing challenges of migration.

How can pro bono initiatives/projects tackle cross-border injustice and bring sustainable impacts? This session will show three outstanding pro bono projects led by law firms and NGOs and discuss 1) key ingredients and lessons learned in cross-border pro bono collaboration; 2) how to encourage and maintain sustainable partnerships between law firms, NGOs and/or other stakeholders; and 3) how to make pro bono collaboration more effective and influential (for example, through impact assessment, technology innovation, etc.)

The morning plenary will be split into two parts with the overall theme of how the global legal community can support refugees and others affected by crisis and beyond. The first part will feature two spark talks highlighting the importance of the legal community in crisis response but also showcasing how law firms can take more proactive steps in achieving greater diversity among pro bono professionals. The second part will be a fireside chat with two Afghan judges and a Ukrainian lawyer who will share their personal stories as we will try to learn what we, as a legal community, can do better to support refugees and others affected by the crisis and beyond.

• Spark Talk with Gillian Triggs, Assistant High Commissioner for Protection UNHCR, on how the legal community can further support refugees and advance their rights globally.
• Spark Talk with Awmaima Amrayaf, Pro Bono Legal Officer at DLA Piper, about diversity in pro bono.
• Fireside Chat with Negina Nayab Basiq and Zahra Haidari, Afghan judges, and Pavlo Bogachenko, Ukrainian lawyer at Kinstellar, about how the pro bono community can support refugees.

Presentation of a new innovative tool from DLA Piper, ECNL and PILnet for CSOs and activists around the world – Global Nonprofits Guide. This project aims to strengthen the resilience and autonomy of nonprofit organizations by providing an easily accessible and user-friendly platform on non-profit registration around the world. It is a resource for organizations wanting to move their operations or open new branches in another country, or for individuals wishing to set up a nonprofit organization. The project showcases a multi-jurisdictional pro bono collaboration from more than dozen firms and the application of law with the help of technology.

Conversations about technology’s potential to enable pro bono often start and end at big opportunities without providing concrete examples or tools for organizations to use to progress their technology adoption journey. 

Three clearinghouses with experience in digital transformation will lead this session, providing a framework to support clearinghouses to understand, identify and segment different areas of operations and service-delivery that can be supported by technology. The session will zoom in on two areas with major potential for technology impact: outreach/intake and pro bono matching. Participants will also have an opportunity to ask session presenters for their reflections on their organizations’ digital transformation journey.

With migration ramping back up after Covid-19, pro bono lawyers will increasingly encounter survivors of trauma from a broader range of cultural backgrounds. This session will give participants a hands-on introduction to effectively engaging such clients from cultures different from their own. Using a case exercise drawn from real life, the session will explore a survivor/lawyer relationship spanning two cultures to draw strategies that are portable to other places, people and backgrounds.

How can pro bono lawyers best collaborate and allocate resources to increase access to legal assistance for refugees and others in need of resettlement or complementary legal pathways to protection? Drawing on lessons from recent crises, including Afghanistan and Ukraine, this roundtable will critically examine how pro bono lawyers, in collaboration with refugees and their allies, can best contribute during times of crises, in a way that empowers refugees to retain their agency.

This session will discuss the LFAA, an alliance of more than 300 law firms working to help dismantle systemic racism in the law. LFAA focuses on three pillars of work: (1) education/convening; (2) creation and growth of infrastructure supporting racial justice pro bono work; and (3) research into substantive areas of law regarding systemic racism. LFAA has created and is maintaining a community of lawyers and professionals who share a commitment to antiracism. The session will invite participants to think of LFAA as a case study for building similar alliances to tackle racism in other geographies or to take on other systemic injustices.

Regulatory limitations implemented by banks affecting civil society, de-risking, is one of many threats to today’s CSOs. Limitations are usually applied based on anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism financing regulations; however, this risk-averse and discriminatory practice often leaves CSOs with restricted or no access to financial institutions. The session discusses current challenges CSOs face and opportunities available for a law firm’s pro bono practice to ensure the financial inclusion of civil society organizations.

In less than a decade, public interest lawyers from across Africa have worked tirelessly with activists, researchers and paralegals to build a body of evidence on the oppressive nature of some criminal offences, which blatantly discriminate against people based on poverty, sexual orientation, disability, or other status. The panelists are part of the Global Campaign to Decriminalise Poverty and Status and lead litigation and advocacy to decriminalise poverty and status in their countries and in regional fora.

Cross-border data protection issues including international data, cloud storage and cross-border agreements call for a holistic understanding from lawyers and privacy practitioners, if privacy rights are to be protected in the digital world. With more countries adopting data protection mechanisms, it has become necessary not only to build expertise in data protection but also engage in cross-border collaborations to ensure human rights compliance and business continuity.

On 25 May 2018, Ireland voted by an overwhelming majority to overturn the constitutional ban on abortion. It was the culmination of a massive campaign that mobilised huge numbers of Irish people to give, canvass, campaign and vote for radical change. This session will look at the strategies, techniques and stories that Together for Yes – the civil society campaign for a Yes vote in the referendum – used to inspire thousands of people to get involved, vote and ultimately change the future of reproductive health rights in Ireland.

Transparency International Ireland and the Transparency Legal Advice Centre will engage with the Public Interest Law community on the topic of whistleblower protection. Participants will be invited to discuss the challenges faced by whistleblowers, applying their expertise to identify solutions to these challenges. Participants will be invited to examine how the Public Interest Law community can support whistleblowers with the aim of empowering them to safely raise concerns in the public interest and have those concerns addressed.

• Julia Mayerhofer
• Andrej Nosko