Responding individually

A more recent connection between the Firm and the Red Cross occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. With devastating impact, Sandy had struck the New Jersey shoreline and the lower part of New York City. An associate in the Firm’s Washington, D.C. office, Jonathan Ulrich, canceled his vacation to volunteer for the relief efforts. He participated in the distribution of supplies, eventually becoming the coordinator of a fleet of 70 trucks and 100 volunteers that delivered two million items of food, water and basic necessities. He was presented with a Red Cross Exceptional Volunteer Service Award. Ensuring access to justice through pro bono activity has always been one of the Firm’s core values and found its most vocal advocate in Orison Marden. His work for the Legal Aid Society of New York and similar organizations for four and a half decades was exemplary. Rick Holwell vividly recalls that, when he arrived at the Firm in 1971, Marden was still taking on legal aid and pro bono cases. “Orison was then about 65, a charming man and quietly spoken but absolutely dedicated to the cause of helping those who would not otherwise get legal representation and redressing injustice. Every Tuesday evening, young lawyers from the Firm would go to a legal aid office in Harlem and take on cases. My very first trial was a custody dispute in a Bronx County Court, not your typical White & Case matter.” Holwell also led a celebrated class action alleging race and sex discrimination by the Long Island Railroad. As Marden himself said, “In helping to carry out a program dedicated to the principle of equal justice for all, we have nothing to lose and much to gain.”

Responding in teams

Marden also believed lawyers should work to improve the legal profession and is one of the few lawyers who have served as president of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the New York State Bar Association and the American Bar Association. Carolyn Lamm shares this view and became president of the American Bar Association in the 2009–2010 year after serving for many years on a number of its committees. Hal Fales was another White & Case partner with Bar connections, serving as president of the New York State Bar Association in 1983. Fales was president of the Pierpont Morgan Library in Manhattan and chairman of St. Barnabas Hospital, the Bronx. He worked with the National Center for State Courts and the Fund for Modern Courts, seeking to streamline the court process. He worked on behalf of women prisoners for the Women’s Prison Association. He also worked for the Legal Aid Society, which he described as his “old love.” Three former White & Case partners have achieved the distinction of becoming federal judges: Paul Friedman, who became a federal district court judge in 1994, sitting in the District of Columbia; Allan Gropper, who was appointed as a U.S. bankruptcy judge for the Southern District of New York in 2000; and Rick Holwell, who became a federal district court judge in 2003, sitting in the Southern District of New York.

Responding as a firm

While the Firm was proud of its pro bono and community activities at the individual and team levels, in 2009, at the instigation of Hugh Verrier, who had become Chair of the Firm two years earlier, the Firm moved its pro bono and community activities into a new phase. Verrier recruited the Firm’s first head of social responsibility, Jo Weiss, to provide senior staff leadership for a global initiative covering among other things pro bono work, legal education and the encouragement of volunteer activity by lawyers and staff. The magic circle firms in London had made moves in this direction, but White & Case was the first U.S. firm to make such a serious and public commitment to the full range of corporate social responsibility issues. Within two years, several other U.S. firms had taken note and followed suit in a trend that continues to escalate. In an equally innovative move, in 2010, Hugh Verrier made pro bono one of the Firm’s 13 global practices and appointed Ian Forrester as global practice leader. That meant operating the Firm’s pro bono activity in the same way as other practice areas, underpinned by formal structures, regular meetings, firmwide communication and rigorous monitoring of progress. Forrester observes that the goal was to bring together the many disparate and excellent pro bono initiatives under one coordinated program: “Almost all the offices were doing pro bono activities of some description or another, but no one knew what everyone else was doing. New matters that were worthy but random came from local initiatives. We also thought we were not using our skills and network to the fullest extent because we were not harnessing the potential of our cross-border, multicultural capability.” Forrester recruited partners and lawyers around the world to help champion and guide the practice. They set a strategy focused on three types of pro bono work: activities to provide justice and promote human rights; serving non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and nonprofit bodies that address social or environmental issues; and cross-border research projects, legal education and advisory work to help emerging democracies build legal institutions and embed the rule of law. Criteria were agreed upon to determine the matters that would be taken on and the organizations that would be supported. The Firm’s pro bono program is as comprehensive, extensive and far-reaching as that of any global law firm. Each year, White & Case lawyers contribute in total almost 90,000 hours of legal time to pro bono activities. “Pro bono is woven into the fabric of the Firm,” notes Forrester. “The commitment to society was laid down by our founders, and we are proud to continue that tradition of contributing to the greater good.” When Forrester left the Firm in October 2015 to become the UK’s judge at the General Court of the European Union, Jacqui MacLennan succeeded him as the leader of the Firm’s global pro bono practice. Reflecting Forrester’s sentiments, MacLennan notes: “Pro bono is valued just as much today as when the Firm was founded, and I’m pleased that in 2016 all of our offices participated in pro bono activities for the fourth year in a row. This demonstrates our success in making our pro bono practice global, even in countries where engaging in pro bono activity is not a part of the law firm culture.”

White & Case and 9/11

The strength of the Firm’s pro bono commitment came to the fore in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. In response, the Firm set up the White & Case September 11th Fund with an initial endowment of $500,000, which it supplemented on a dollar-for-dollar matching basis for all additional contributions from White & Case lawyers, staff, clients and friends from around the world. A total of $700,000 was finally raised and donated. The Firm’s lawyers provided more than 3,000 hours of pro bono advice on some 50 distinct matters, the equivalent of about $1 million. The work included advising on the establishment of foundations for the benefit of victims and their families and establishing the 29th Street Firefighters Relief Fund. The Firm also provided general planning and coordinating support to the City Bar Fund, a unit of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, which led the efforts of New York’s legal community in its response to September 11th.

Promoting the rule of law

At the heart of the Firm’s social responsibility program is the promotion of the rule of law. As Hugh Verrier said in 2008: “The greatest thing a global law firm can do is build the rule of law around the world. Much of the pro bono work we do strengthens the rule of law either by supporting broad change or by setting an example of what a lawyer’s role in the global community should be.” By operating pro bono as a global practice, the Firm has made use of its global footprint and strengths in cross-frontier transaction management on projects that would otherwise not be done. For example, the Firm has provided legal research and analysis on the governance and management of disputes in connection with water boundaries; studied the criminalization of homelessness across Europe; and researched truth commission operations across Latin America. Each year, the Firm’s lawyers also train judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers in many parts of Africa, the Caribbean and Asia. Perhaps the best example is the Firm’s pioneering research on human trafficking, working with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to develop a comprehensive and global online database of human trafficking cases. In 2012, the Firm’s lawyers researched the levels of prosecution and enforcement of human trafficking laws (or equivalent) in 163 countries. The research—the largest pro bono project ever undertaken by the Firm—involved more than 175 lawyers from 24 offices, with overall supervision provided by partner Someera Khokhar in New York. The data collected are proving invaluable in helping to point out weaknesses in enforcement of existing legislation (especially in countries where there is a history of institutional reluctance), encouraging greater enforcement and helping tackle the iniquities of modern-day slavery. The Firm is following up on the research by assisting victims of trafficking in the United States to bring civil litigation against their abusers to secure compensation, assisting with the establishment of anti-trafficking hotlines in countries that victims can use to report abuse, and advising anti-trafficking NGOs on their general corporate and commercial matters. named this comprehensive approach to combating human trafficking the Global Pro Bono Program of the Year in 2013.

Serving leading nonprofit organizations

The Firm has formed a number of collaborative ventures with nonprofit organizations that share the same values. A good example of this is Acumen, a global social enterprise that invests in water, health and sanitation, and other social projects. The Firm’s lawyers have advised on a multitude of both equity and debt deals for Acumen. In the booming social venture sector, White & Case lawyers drafted the suite of documents for debt and equity listings on the world’s first social investment stock exchange, the Impact Exchange, or iX. Other leading NGO clients include Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which provides medical services in areas affected by conflict and natural disasters. The Firm has advised on managing legal risk in more than 50 countries where MSF operates. The Firm has expanded strategic partnerships with several pro bono clients in Germany, including Amnesty International, the Rainforest Alliance and the Foundation UNESCO—Education for Children in Need. In so doing, the Firm is leading the way to create a pro bono culture among German law firms, where pro bono as a tradition does not exist. The Firm believes in long-term pro bono relationships, and partner Sylvia Chin has represented Women’s World Banking, a global network of microfinance institutions, on a pro bono basis for the past 35 years.

Striving for social justice

The Firm has never shied away from taking on controversial issues. One of these was its representation of the Log Cabin Republicans, which challenged the constitutionality of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law. This 1993 U.S. law banned openly gay, lesbian and bisexual people from serving in the U.S. military. The Firm took on the representation following a request by an associate, who was a member of the Log Cabin Republicans, to partner Dan Woods. After years, the team won an historic federal court ruling in 2010 declaring this law to be unconstitutional on the basis that it was in violation of the First and the Fifth Amendments. It was a decision of momentous importance for patriotic gay men and women who served or who might wish to serve in the U.S. military. Later that year, the U.S. Congress voted to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the Firm’s case was cited as having led directly to the repeal. In London, White & Case became the first law firm partner of Innocence Network UK, a nonprofit organization that seeks to have wrongful convictions set aside. In its first case from Innocence Network UK, a team of White & Case lawyers worked to exonerate a British man from murder charges he has denied for more than 30 years. The White & Case team worked on this case for more than four years, pursuing leads even after the client was released from prison on parole.

Promoting legal education

White & Case is the global partner and International Rounds sponsor of the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition. The Jessup Competition was founded in 1959 and involves student lawyers pitting their wits and skills against others in a simulated “moot” court hearing as if arguing before the International Court of Justice. The teams represent fictional countries in a hypothetical dispute on a matter of international law. Every year, more than 2,000 law students from some 550 schools in 90 countries take part in the competition, which is a highly prestigious event. White & Case sponsors more than 10 national and regional competitions and is the official sponsor of the White & Case International Rounds. More than 150 of the Firm’s lawyers work on the competition each year, judging oral rounds and written briefs in national competitions around the world and at the International Rounds in Washington, D.C. The Firm underwrote and helped produce a feature documentary about the Jessup Competition that premiered at the United Nations in 2015, . In 2016, gave the Firm its Global Citizenship Award for Lifetime Achievement for its longstanding support of the Jessup. Among the more exotic projects the Firm has pursued is its collaboration with the Kingdom of Bhutan—one of the world’s most geographically isolated countries, and among its newest democracies—to create the country’s first law school and strengthen the rule of law. The Firm’s involvement stemmed from a holiday visit to Bhutan some years ago by partner Andreas Knebel, who noticed the lack of legal infrastructure. He suggested to Hugh Verrier that this was an opportunity for the Firm to help, particularly as the country had no domestic law school and only about 100 lawyers, all educated abroad, for a population of nearly one million people. Following a personal meeting between Verrier and the King, it was agreed that the Firm would provide valuable support. His Majesty then appointed his sister—Harvard LL.M. graduate Princess Sonam Dechan Wangchuck—to head up the project as president of the Royal Institute of Law. During the first stage of this collaboration, Bhutan and White & Case established Bhutan’s first law library in the capital, Thimphu. A cross-office multifunction team from the Firm provided technical assistance, infrastructure and also training on legal research and writing for Bhutan’s judiciary, government lawyers and the few lawyers in private practice. The Firm then recruited two academics from a U.S. law school to move to Bhutan and assist with the development of the law school’s strategic plan, curriculum and business model.

In the fall of 2014, Verrier and Her Royal Highness presented this collaboration as a joint commitment to action at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting. In 2015, His Majesty granted the law school a Royal Charter and land in the mountains above the town of Paro. The government of India committed funds to construct a new state-of-the-art campus. The school has begun hiring the faculty, decided on an admissions process and crafted a curriculum that, while drawing upon legal experience from around the globe, is uniquely Bhutanese. The first class is expected to begin studies in summer 2017. named this collaboration with Bhutan to create the country’s first law school its 2015 Global Corporate Social Responsibility Program of the Year.

Collaborating with clients

Many of the Firm’s clients are sponsoring or participating in social responsibility initiatives, and the Firm often works with clients on these initiatives. The Firm is pro bono counsel to the Global Network Initiative (GNI) to protect global Internet freedom. GNI was founded in 2008 as a nonprofit coalition by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! in collaboration with academics, investors and NGOs. Lawyers in the Firm’s Brussels and Geneva offices worked with a team of lawyers from Caterpillar to research the rights of children for the Firm’s “legal status of the child global research project” on behalf of pro bono client Child Rights International Network. Lawyers in the Firm’s Paris office have worked with Intel to provide intellectual property advice to an educational nonprofit organization that promotes democratization. The Firm is partnering with Nestlé to support youth employment initiatives across Europe and with Goldman Sachs on global research projects related to the online sexual exploitation of children as well as access to financial services for women entreprenuers.

Looking to the future

Verrier is one of the Firm’s primary advocates of its social responsibility initiatives: “We all want to be part of something larger than ourselves. We offer our people the opportunity to engage with today’s challenges and be part of something greater. By serving the public good, we uphold our responsibility to our profession and the global community. By making a difference in the lives of others, we strengthen ourselves and the fabric of our Firm.”