Stroock Lawyers Win Legal Business Award Without Billing a Cent
Kevin J. Curnin didn’t charge a single billable hour last year. And, his clients, mostly nonprofit organizations in New York’s South Bronx, won’t pay the Stroock & Stroock & Lavan partner a penny this year, either.
Curnin is the full-time Director of Stroock’s Public Service Project, which will receive the 2009 National Public Service Award for a law firm from the American Bar Association Section of Business Law on April 17. Curnin said the firm provided 27,000 hours of pro bono legal assistance in 2008—including 11,000 hours of transactional work—in the South Bronx, one of the poorest congressional districts in the country.
“We’re not on the street like our clients, but we offer legal support to help them do their job better,” Curnin said of Stroock’s commitment to nonprofits like Rocking the Boat and Sustainable South Bronx. “We are their general counsel, and we aspire to establish the same ongoing relationships that we have with our Fortune 100 clients.”
Although Stroock had historically handled pro bono matters, its efforts, like most firms, were largely reactive to cases brought to the firm, rather than a proactive effort to seek out underrepresented nonprofits and battle poverty. The firm’s pro bono committee didn’t have an attorney dedicated full-time to its cause or a strategic business model.
“What we did, was say look, ‘Let’s revisit this and treat it with same kind of scrutiny as we treat billable departments. Let’s create a new model for it,’ ” Curnin said to the ABA Journal in an interview. “Our philosophy was: This is Stroock work, and just because it’s not paid work doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold it to same standard and expectations for billable work. If our name is on it, we should do it thoughtfully, purposefully and efficiently.”
Stroock launched its Public Service Project in 2001 after Curnin, then a fifth-year associate, proposed a program focused on a highly identifiable geographic area in need of help—the South Bronx. He also offered to helm the project. Since then, Curmin’s caseload has gravitated away from commercial litigation and toward the day-to-day needs of small New York businesses.
“New York not-for-profits are at the leading edge,” Curnin said. “They are run by entrepreneurial, progressive and very smart people who want to do this type of work, but don’t have legal backgrounds.” Nonprofits also make up a sizable portion of the city’s economy—though they are often overlooked in the land of Wall Street, Curnin added.
Traditionally, when lawyers think of pro bono matters, they think of evictions and asylum cases, Curnin explained. Conversely, “Stroock is a full-service Wall Street firm; we need to do transactional work.”
Prior to 2001, Curnin said he was hard-pressed to find and staff transactional pro bono cases. However, pro bono transactional opportunities in tax, health care, intellectual property, finance and real estate “have exploded in the last eight years.”
As the economy lags and poverty-stricken communities on the verge of renaissance are now set back, Curnin said the firm is positioned to fight against the tide by leveraging its financial and business expertise for clients, as well as handling litigation matters in family and housing courts.
“We don’t seek out the most glamorous work,” Curnin said, “but rather the day-to-day heavy lifting that most needs to be done.”
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