Serving the Common Good Where We Live and Practice

At Haynes and Boone we believe that a meaningful professional career is much more than just handling major business transactions or trying complex lawsuits. Our lawyers actively use the law for helping those people and organizations who need it most but are least able to pay.

Haynes and Boone is committed to supporting such opportunities for pro bono service and believes this kind of leadership is the right thing for a firm like ours to do. It serves the common good where we live and practice.

Taking Pro Bono Seriously
Although we believe that all of our lawyers should make personal decisions about public service, we formed our firmwide Pro Bono/Public Service Committee nearly 20 years ago to coordinate pro bono legal work and other public service opportunities and match them to our lawyers and staff. The Committee includes associates and partners, and our encouragement of pro bono service is reflected in the fact that more than 70% of associates and nearly 40% of partners regularly undertake pro bono work.

Our goal is that each lawyer should aspire to at least 50 hours of pro bono public legal services per year – and our annual total of some 17,500 pro bono hours is testimony to how seriously Haynes and Boone lawyers take the pro bono challenge.

We take these individual efforts seriously:

• Our lawyers are all required to report their pro bono hours the same way they report billable hours
• Pro bono time is viewed favorably in performance reviews
• Every associate is required to handle a pro bono case as soon as they join the firm.

Achieving Worthwhile Results
The matters that our lawyers undertake are as diverse as society’s needs. For example, we represent:

• Abused and neglected children, and unaccompanied immigrant children in the U.S.
• Seekers of political asylum who face violence or death if they return to their home countries
• Indigent clients who need help ranging from family violence situations to defense in death penalty cases.

Often our efforts result in well-deserved recognition: recent examples include the Outstanding Firm Contribution Award from the Houston Bar Foundation for the firm's significant contributions and volunteer work on behalf of the Houston Volunteer Lawyers Program, to special awards conferred on Dallas partner Joyce Mazero by Promise House (a non-profit shelter for runaway, homeless and at-risk youths), and on Houston partner Alene Ross Levy by child advocacy group Justice for Children.

But many are quiet victories for those in dire need of legal services. For example, two Houston associates - Josh Chaffin and Erin LeBaron - recently represented a Nepalese couple who suffered kidnapping and threats for their politics while living in their homeland. Haynes and Boone attorneys, working in collaboration with the Human Rights Initiative of North Texas, spent more than two years seeking asylum in the United States for the couple. When victory was finally secured in July 2009, Christine Cooney Mansour, legal director for Dallas-based HRI, thanked the firm for its dedication. “Haynes and Boone has been a long-time HRI supporter,” Ms. Mansour said. “The firm is the only one in Houston that we turn to when one of our Dallas attorneys cannot be there. That is a big deal to us. We really appreciate it.”

Organizations we assist include:

• 2011 New York World Police & Fire Games
• Volunteer Legal Services of Central Texas
• Dallas Volunteer Attorney Program
• Justice for Children
• Access Fund
• Promise House
• National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
• Human Rights Initiative of North Texas
• Houston Volunteer Lawyer Program
• Goodwill Industries of Dallas
• State Bar of Texas Access to Justice Commission
• Kids in Need of Defense (KIND)
• Camp Fire USA