Pro Bono Community

Who we are

Britain is experiencing a legal advice deficit. Pro Bono Community (‘PBC’) is a registered charity which provides specialist training so as to equip lawyers, trainees, and law students with  the skills and expertise to become effective volunteers, before placing them in advice agencies. By training volunteers and providing them with volunteering placements, we aim to increase the amount -  and improve the quality -  of free legal advice in the areas of law affecting those in need.

The charity’s primary aim is to help advice agencies increase the scope and quality of advice they can offer to some of the most vulnerable people in society. In order to improve access to justice, we have developed rigorous, specialised training courses for lawyers, trainees and law students, delivered by experts in the relevant field. In addition to arranging placements for the volunteers in advice agencies, PBC also seeks to help those organisations overcome the constraints on their capacity to use more volunteers effectively.

Furthermore, by developing a range of high level, standardised courses we aim to improve the quality of education in the advice sector in general. In addition to the benefits to the advice agencies, attendees of PBC’s training gain valuable skills and experience in areas of the law they are unlikely to have come across either in law school or practice. We hope that our training will serve to embed the pro bono culture in the hearts and minds of young lawyers and that many of them will go on to become champions for volunteering and pro bono work in their future careers.

One of our strategic objectives is to gain formal accreditation for our training with a view to integrating it into the curriculum of law students, thus increasing the level of support advice agencies receive as well as embedding an understanding of and enthusiasm for social welfare law in young lawyers. We are increasingly making use of technology in innovative ways to achieve our aims.

In the year from September 2024, PBC trained cohorts of lawyers, trainees and students from law firms and universities including Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Osborne Clarke, City University, LSE, Oxford University, Leeds University, SOAS, Goldsmiths, Oxford Brookes, the University of Law, BPP, Queen Mary University, Birkbeck and Royal Holloway. The income derived from sales to law firms and universities was supplemented by grant income from City Bridge Foundation and the National Lottery Community Fund.

PBC is committed to finding ways to mitigate the constraints on the use of volunteers by advice agencies as a result of limited resources for supervision. Furthermore, the charity sought to develop grant applications for projects which address the needs of people whose lives have been adversely affected by the cost-of-living crisis and the ongoing impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2024, we successfully applied for a grant from the National Lottery Community Fund (NLCF) to set up and run a digital advice clinic which included dedicated resource for supervision and involved PBC more actively in the running of the clinic in conjunction with our partner Citizens Advice Haringey. We are also about to begin the third year of a five-year project funded by City Bridge Foundation which enables us to run student volunteer training and placement programmes in London at no cost to universities or students,