The Meaning of Pro Bono: Institutional Variations in Professional Obligations among Lawyers

Recent data on lawyer participation in pro bono have suggested that such work flows from the intrinsic value one derives from volunteering as well as from workplace characteristics of those who provide pro bono service. This finding would imply that pro bono emerges not merely from individual per-sonality traits but that the workplace environment structures motives and incentives for pro bono work. Such a finding points to a need to disentangle the effects of diverse workplace settings on the construction of different vo-cabularies of motive for engaging in pro bono work. In this article I employ an institutional framework to examine the impact of the workplace environment on participation in pro bono work among lawyers. Survey data were collected from 474 lawyers who graduated from three law schools that have mandatory pro bono requirements. Results indicate that lawyers ’ meanings of pro bono as well as their motivations for doing such work and the benefits they attribute to such work vary across workplace settings. These results are discussed in re-lation to institutional theory. Within the past two decades, pro bono work has received increased attention within the American legal profession.1 While for most of American legal history pro bono was dispensed infor-mally and administered in an atomistic fashion through charitable organizations, it has more recently become ‘‘centralized and streamlined, distributed through an elaborate organizational struc-ture embedded in and cutting across professional associations, law firms, state-sponsored legal services programs, and nonprofi