‘Pro bono work can be like foreign aid projects and cause more harm than good,’ argues one contributor in a new collection of essays, Pro Bono: Good Enough?.

The publication is the second in the ‘justice gap’ series. The first collection, Closing the Justice Gap, published in May, called for ‘radical, exciting and innovative ways to reform and improve access to justice’.

National Pro Bono Week, which rightly celebrates the good work done by solicitors, barristers and legal executives starts on Monday. Pro Bono: Good Enough? is not part of it. We do not mean to detract from that but we aim to challenge some of the assumptions behind pro bono in a constructive and positive spirit.

Our collection features 18 contributors, including Lord Phillips of Sudbury and LawWorks’ Rebecca Hilsenrath, campaigners such as Roger Smith of Justice and Steve Hynes of the Legal Action Group, legal aid lawyers such as Sir Geoffrey Bindman and former Law Society president Andrew Holroyd, as well as representatives from larger firms, such as Clifford Chance’s Michael Smyth and Neil Kinsella, senior partner at Russell Jones & Walker.

The ‘justice gap’ refers to the ‘increasing section of the public too poor to afford a lawyer and not poor enough to qualify for legal aid’, writes Michael Mansfield QC, introducing the series: ‘At the heart of any notion of a decent society is not only that we have rights and protections under the law, but that we can enforce those rights and rely upon those protections if needed... Something has gone wrong.’

Pro Bono: Good Enough? explores the relationship between the profession’s volunteer activities and ‘access to justice’. It is an uneasy one. Pro bono, we are told, is ‘an adjunct to, not a substitute for, legal aid’ – a neat formulation that suggests a clearly delineated relationship. But life is not that simple. None of our contributors suggests it is.

Geoffrey Bindman, while applauding the ‘energy and commitment’ of lawyers committed to pro bono, argues that the movement has become a smokescreen whereby the profession evades its wider responsibility for ensuring access to justice.

He makes the ‘ethical case’ for every solicitor to support legal aid. According to Bindman, in 1949 when legal aid was included as part of the welfare state, ‘the price paid’ by the profession for avoiding the imposition of a NHS-style National Legal Service (NLS) was its ‘commitment as a profession to manage legal aid’. He writes: ‘Lawyers whose clients can afford to pay for their services have largely turned their backs on it.’

It is a controversial contribution, not least because the veteran legal aid lawyer argues for a levy on the larger law firms. Intriguingly, there is an echo of this in the essay by Crispin Passmore, legal strategy director at the Legal Services Board (writing in a personal capacity). A levy of £100 per lawyer would raise £15m a year, Passmore argues; a structured levy based on turnover could raise £50m to £60m.

Neil Kinsella also invokes legal aid’s origins. As the Attlee government never set up a NLS, society has ‘always had to rely on the profession to help ensure access to justice’. If pro bono is ‘fundamental to access to justice’, then it needs to be delivered in a more strategic and organised way.

‘We can no longer rely on the goodwill of firms and individuals to provide advice as and when they feel like it,’ writes Kinsella. ‘It should become compulsory for all lawyers to play their part, not just those in the City, but those at the other end of the scale that do "nice" legal work (I don’t mean legal aid lawyers, who are virtually working pro bono full time).’

The idea of the project is not to endorse one particular view but to add to the debate. Two events in the last few weeks have helped focus minds.

First, there was the establishment of the National Pro Bono Centre – ‘a key milestone in the coming of age of the pro bono community’, according to the attorney general Dominic Grieve QC. The following day there was another, less happy legal milestone – the government’s spending review. Legal aid, that small but vital backwater of our public services, took a heavy hit.

If pro bono has come of age, how will it respond to the challenges of an increasingly impoverished legal aid sector?

Jon Robins is editor of Pro Bono: Good Enough?, part of the ‘justice gap’ series, produced by the legal research company Jures