Pro Bono

For more than 100 years, O’Melveny lawyers have been actively involved in their communities, engaging in our profession’s highest calling—ensuring access to justice through pro bono representation of the poor and disenfranchised. In 1929, Jack O’Melveny helped found the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, still the oldest and largest organization serving the poor in Southern California. O’Melveny lawyers answered the call of President Kennedy in 1963 to come to Washington, DC and organize in support of the civil rights workers in the deep South, out of which grew the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. And in the 1990s, we successfully defended before the US Supreme Court the constitutionality of the Interest On Lawyers Trust Accounts programs, the country’s second largest funding source for the provision of free legal aid to the poor.

We have a long-established policy of giving lawyers full credit for all pro bono hours. In 2012, attorneys at O’Melveny devoted almost 60,000 hours of legal representation to pro bono matters, averaging almost 100 hours per lawyer. The value of this work amounted to more than US$30 million worth of legal services to the poor and voiceless, as our pro bono program rose to meet our clients' needs. This represented roughly 5.67% of our total billable output and involved the participation of more than 81% of the Firm’s lawyers. In the past year, more than 56% of our attorneys reported doing more than 20 hours of pro bono work. While the number of pro bono hours recorded by our lawyers has been maintained at a dramatically high level over the past several years, we prefer to measure the impact of our work by the people we serve and the lives we touch.

O'Melveny & Myers LLP was honored to receive the American Bar Association's prestigious Pro Bono Publico Award. VIEW VIDEO