Project description
Understanding the rise of big law pro bono work in global advocacy
Top private law firms are increasingly taking on pro bono work to address societal needs. This shift has transformed their role, as they now engage in a broader range of activities, from litigation to training and advising stakeholders, particularly in the Global South. However, this trend raises concerns about the impact on NGOs and local organisations, which may find themselves marginalised in their own advocacy spaces. The ERC-funded PROBONO project will study how private law firms operate in this arena. By collecting quantitative data and conducting in-depth case studies on big law pro bono efforts related to women’s rights and environmental justice, PROBONO seeks to enhance understanding of the implications for global advocacy.
Objective
Top private law firms increasingly offer their services as advocates for societal needs at no or low cost—big law pro bono. This work changed significantly over the past decade: firms take on more pro bono activities, professionally organize those in-house, and do so over a wider geography, in particular the Global South. While traditionally engaging in litigation, pro bono lawyers have now expanded towards the full range of activities of transnational advocacy: they train and educate stakeholders, they advise international institutions and non-profit organizations, and they engage in institution-building. To do so, they rely on powerful resources, not least lawyers who went to the best law schools, ever-increasing revenues, and highly influential networks. However, we lack systematic knowledge on how big law does good and with which implications for transnational advocacy.
PROBONO is the first project to tackle this key research question at a crucial point in time. The project’s claim is that big law pro bono is crowding NGOs and local organizations out of their traditional advocacy space. These firms are not affected by the shrinking space observed for traditional human rights defenders and they are both accustomed to and better equipped for navigating democratic backsliding and authoritarian contexts. As these firms gain exclusive influence on law- and policy-making across levels, they change the organizational ecology of the field—with as yet unknown consequences.
This project studies the patterns, practices, and consequences of private law firms as transnational advocates. It collects and analyses unique quantitative data and conducts in-depth qualitative case studies on big law pro bono for women’s rights and the right to a healthy environment. PROBONO significantly advances our knowledge of big law pro bono and its empirical and normative implications for transnational advocacy, bridging debates in International Relations and International Law.
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences political sciences political policies civil society civil society organisations nongovernmental organizations
- natural sciences biological sciences ecology
- social sciences law
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG
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0313 Oslo
Norway
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