While prime minister David Cameron’s idea of the ‘Big Society’ has left many people unclear as to what their own role or contribution to it could be, for lawyers the answer looks fairly simple: pro bono work can use lawyers’ skills, knowledge and professional standing to meet unmet need. The legal profession has much of the infrastructure in place to help lawyers play that role.

Talk from the top of the last government about the need for pro bono work to be ‘in the DNA of very lawyer’ was matched by the focus of LawWorks and its sister organisations on getting unmet need met more systematically, and by as wide a range of lawyers as possible. Such initiatives will next week pass a milestone, with the official launch of the National Pro Bono Centre, marked by an event at the Royal Courts of Justice. The centre includes LawWorks, the Bar Pro Bono Unit, and the ILEX Pro Bono Forum.

Good for the professionThe coalition government is keen to show its support for pro bono work, and Jonathan Djanogly, parliamentary under secretary of state at the Ministry of Justice, will speak at the launch event on 19 October. He will not be a lone representative of government there, with the attorney general Dominic Grieve QC and solicitor general Edward Garnier QC likely to attend to hear speeches from Djanogly and the lord chief justice.

Djanogly takes the view that pro bono work is not just good for the public interest, but good for the legal profession itself. ‘Pro bono work provides lawyers with a sense of community,’ he argues. ‘Lawyers get quite easily "silo-ed" – whether that’s as a high street conveyancer, or a commercial lawyer sitting on the eighteenth floor drafting euro bonds. Pro bono can take them out of their specialism and into other areas – some of those areas they may want to return to later in their career.’

Djanogly’s view of what pro bono should be is self-consciously broad, and notably close to the style of corporate responsibility promoted by firms in the City, where he spent two decades in practice. In fact, he still comes across as every inch the City lawyer – neat, smooth, friendly and to the point.

Pro bono should not be just about free legal advice, he says. ‘For much of my 21 years in practice, the thinking has been that pro bono means lawyers giving free advice,’ but, he adds, ‘pro bono is more than that.’

His vision takes lawyers much closer to the leg-work of the Big Society than using their legal skills only. ‘Pro bono can be trainees giving reading lessons to kids with learning difficulties,’ Djanogly says, recalling his experience at his old firm SJ Berwin. ‘As a City practice, we realised that just half a mile away in Southwark were these kids who need that sort of help. So we made arrangements with local schools.’

He also sees the need for lawyers to use contact with these communities to help raise aspirations. ‘We also realised that bringing children from those schools into the firm is something that would benefit them if they had no idea what an office environment was like. An idea of what to aspire to – it could open their eyes.’

There is a business case for that sort of engagement, he says: ‘There is no better way to pull a firm together than non-financial projects.’ His own project was, of course, politics. He mixed his own career as a young City lawyer with the role of a local councillor on Westminster Council, ‘leaving a council meeting at 10pm to come back to work’. Later, when elected to parliament in 1997, in John Major’s old seat of Huntingdon, he combined practice at SJ Berwin with the duties of an MP.

For Djanogly, the new centre will help in practical terms, promoting knowledge of what lawyers are already doing. ‘In the past, this has been seen as the preserve of the larger firms,’ he notes. ‘It will be very good if we can push out pro bono to other firms. They may have less time or resource, so giving them faster access to work that needs doing is important.’

Djanogly is keen that the full range of what firms do gets better recognition. He was impressed, he says, by the long lists of firms helping the citizens advice centres he has recently been visiting in courts: ‘A lot of firms who quietly get on and do it should be recognised.’

He says there are strong reasons for law firms to support the national centre, and that the 27 lead sponsors of the centre are helping to underline the ‘good’ that lawyers do. His former firm is one of seven ‘Gold’ sponsors.

Guided by principlesDjanogly believes there is a growing appetite for the sort of cases that can be handled on a pro bono basis: ‘I think it’s tremendous that these organisations, from recent meetings [I’ve had], are clear that they want to expand what they are doing.’ He also detects that this is an issue that will be discussed in firms from the bottom up: ‘Certainly by the time I left, trainees were asking about these issues in interview – wanting to know what we did about pro bono.’

Of course, the ‘Big Society’ is a concept that, in general, will actually need to deliver services for communities, with large cuts in public sector spending to come following the Comprehensive Spending Review, the results of which will be made public on 20 October (the day after the national centre is launched). The legal profession is focusing closely on the future of the legal aid budget, awaiting both the spending review and the legal aid review. But this is not a subject Djanogly will discuss.

He will, though, talk in more general terms about cuts. The Ministry of Justice is not a ring-fenced department, he points out, and is planning significant cuts in departmental spending beyond the £325m already announced. ‘We have a £9.5bn budget, and the challenge is to cut it by 25%,’ he says. ‘I can’t say whether it will be more or less than that right now. But we are talking about a significant amount of money to be cut.’

Djanogly insists that ministers are guided by principles that will help them to make cuts while preserving the most important things that the department is charged with delivering. ‘Our priority is not about what lawyers do, or the number of lawyers there are doing certain things,’ he says. ‘Our priority is legal representation for vulnerable people. The customer or client needs to be the priority.’

Djanogly leaves the clear impression that this challenge of huge structural change is one with which he would have wanted to engage even if the public finances were not under such intense pressure. Owing to the ‘urgency of the financial situation’ he argues, ‘we have a once in three generations opportunity to significantly readdress how we provide legal services’. He adds: ‘It’s very important to understand that efficiency and timeliness, and access to justice are not inconsistent with having less resource. There are areas that need to be reviewed, and savings can be made.’

Cutting backAnnouncements made on 20 October will answer key questions. But to deliver savings while protecting those principles, Djanogly will rely on the outcome of several reviews set to report between autumn and next spring. These include the Legal Aid Policy Assessment, expected to deliver findings and proposals this autumn; the Jackson Review consultation on civil costs, again due this autumn; the Courts Reorganisation, with a response due over the winter; and the Family Justice Review, expected to report in the spring. ‘It’s not just a case of saying – "slash X". We’re working out how best to spend,’ he insists.

Lawyers have an important role to play in public life, he reflects, and he would like to see more lawyers in the House of Commons. When first elected for Huntingdon in 1997, he was one of 35 new Conservative MPs, and the only lawyer. ‘That’s not healthy,’ he notes, ‘when you consider that the principal role of an MP is to pass national legislation’.

It is a particular problem for opposition parties, he says, which as a result can lack the support they need on committees. ‘A lot of the committees on which MPs sit will want a lawyer,’ he notes. In particular, he says, ‘there are not enough commercial lawyers’. There Djanogly sees in his own experience the two-way benefit that he started the interview expounding: ‘I gained a huge amount through practice that added to my political abilities. And through political engagement, negotiating skills and interpersonal skills are improved.’