Speech Excerpts:

You know, it's not often that lawyers get to be the role models. We're more used to being the butt of jokes and getting shot at by vice presidents. I think, though, what Aaron says is very true. And the thing I think that the legal profession can be very proud of is the longstanding and deeply-ingrained history of a professional ethic that says you can't be the best you can be in this profession unless you are also dedicating a meaningful portion of your professional life to helping those in need, to helping those who need your services, and doing pro bono work. Pro bono, by the way, pro bono publico, means 'for the public good'. It doesn't mean, as I think many people assume it does, 'for free'.

Let me talk about three things. And I think they translate well from the legal profession into the business community. I think there are three elements that go into making a successful pro bono program over the long haul; over not just five years, but over a decade, over a century. I think those three things are the ethic, the plumbing, and the magic. And let me talk briefly about what I mean by each of those things.

The ethic. The ethic means that the profession - and each of you are professionals in your own way - your profession has to ingrain in people coming up through the profession, develop a set of principles and guidelines that says we view success not only as being outstanding in your field, not only in doing what you do as well as you can, but in giving some part of your service back to the community in some meaningful way, and that enshrines that as a standard. The bar has had that for almost 100 years. It has been part of the legal profession's ethics to do pro bono work since well back into the 1920s.

There have been dramatic events in the legal profession that have inspired a renewed commitment to that ethic. I think the most visible in relatively recent history was the formation of the Lawyers' Committee in response to President Kennedy's call during the civil rights era. In the '60s, when all the horrendous civil rights deprivations were going on in the South, President Kennedy had the genius insight to say, "Look, we can't just deal with this as a government matter; we need to call on the private community, the private bar, to deal with this problem." And he called the leaders of the bar into the oval office and said, "You've got to organize to fix this." And they formed what became known as the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and those lawyers were the lawyers who went down there and did yeoman's job in helping to desegregate the South and alleviate the problems that were so endemic throughout the '30s, '40s, '50s, and '60s in the South.

The legal profession's ethics have translated into the ethics of the major law firms and the legal departments of major companies throughout the country. So there is an ethic of doing pro bono work and the lawyers in those organizations are encouraged to do it. In my own law firm, we have a policy that requires every entering lawyer to take on a pro bono matter; that expects every partner - so we do it from the top down - expects every partner to handle a pro bono matter, supervise a pro bono matter, every year. And we evaluate people on that. If they don't do it, come performance evaluation time, we want to know why.

So we ingrain that in our own internal policies as well as in the policies of the profession. So what that means as a practical matter is that in the companies you work at, you really need to look at, and ask yourselves if you haven't, “how do we actually ingrain that ethic in our employee policies, in our expectations for what people should do as employees of our organization?"

The second thing I mentioned was the plumbing. And the plumbing really means there's a lot of goodwill out there; a lot of people really want to do good. And it's a wonderful human quality; most people, given the choice between doing something nasty and doing something wonderful, will pick the wonderful thing. By the way, it's interesting why people do that. I don't think anyone's ever figured out why people are naturally inclined to do good rather than bad, but they are. But there's all this goodwill floating around in large organizations and it's often not channeled; people don't know what to do with it. So organizations have to set up structures so that people who want to do something meaningful in their profession, as part of their company responsibilities, have the channel to do it; they know how to do it. That, by the way, I think is the absolute genius of Aaron's insight, which is, the legal profession has all these organizations. We have wonderful organizations. We have Michael Rothenberg's organization, among many others, legal services organizations, lawyers' committees, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, and Human Rights Watch. We've been pretty successful at setting up clearinghouses, mediating organizations, to help channel that desire to do well into concrete projects.

The business community, in one of its rare lapses behind the legal profession, is actually way behind us in that. And that's why Taproot is so critical, is so important, and was such, in my view, a revolutionary insight into organizing the goodwill and that massive talent that exists in corporate America to accomplish what can be accomplished.

The final thing, I think, is the magic. And it sounds trite, and in this group there's no question that I'm preaching to the choir, but you really can't overstate how much of a difference an organizational commitment to doing public service and doing pro bono work, as we call it in the legal profession, does the organization. It is transformative. People view their organization differently. People view it as not just an organization that's mission is to make money, make newspapers, make widgets, do whatever, but they view it as an organization that also has, as an important part of its mission, doing the right thing; helping the community. And when you engage the organization, when you engage professionals in that kind of activity, it has a transformative effect on the attitude of the people working in these organizations. And we see it from the top down.

One of the things we strive to do, and I think we can do it better, but we try to do it, is not only involve the professionals, the lawyers; we try to involve the lawyers' assistants and everyone else in the organization in these activities. So it's not just a slice of the organization, a slice of the firm, that's doing it, it's everybody. And to a person, when I talk to younger lawyers, when I talk to legal assistants, when I talk to the paralegals about the most meaningful experiences that they've had at our firm, nine out of ten times, it will be a pro bono case. It will be the person they helped who was being evicted. It will be the adoption that they helped someone affect - you know, Weil, Gotshal doesn't do adoption work; it's not what we do. But there was a need, because there were a lot of foster homes that needed legal services that weren't there, to help people adopt children. So we said, we'll figure out how to do that and we'll start a program. And we did it and you know what? It's been one of the most rewarding things we've done and everyone who's touched that program is just so proud of what they've done and it so affects their attitude in a positive way that it's just been enormously gratifying.

In closing, what I would say to all of you is - and again, I almost never get to do this - this is a challenge, sort of, from the legal community to the business community, which is, this is the one place, guys, where you've got to catch up. We're better than you are right now and I'm hopeful that under Aaron's guidance and leadership and with Taproot's wonderful insights that it won't be too long before you guys will come up to me and say, "You know, we've caught up; we're with you. You've got to follow our lead." So thank you.