some people can afford to pay for your efforts – and should.
by ed mendlowitz
call me before you do anything: the art of accounting
i just finished reading john grisham’s novel “gray mountain,” about a young attorney working in a legal aid clinic. at one point she is asked to prepare a will for a woman with property worth about $200,000. this reminded me of some pro bono work i have been asked to do for people who could clearly afford it, and that caused resentment by me.
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i have done my share of real pro bono work and was glad to do it. it left me satisfied that i was able to help someone. but for those who could afford it, i felt like a sap.
one time i was asked to assist a 92-year-old man whose wife was going into a nursing home and he needed help to arrange his affairs so that all his money would not be consumed paying for that. when i went to his house with a pro bono attorney, we found over 50 savings books with at least $10,000 in each account (the total was over $800,000). further it turned out that he wanted us to help him “hide” the money so his wife would become eligible for medicaid. i told the lawyer we should leave and i chalked up the four hours i spent as “experience.”
another time we were asked to help prepare tax returns and get the finances in order for a woman whose husband was killed on september 11, 2001, and certainly looked forward to assisting her. we saw this through to completion on a pro bono basis because we were representing the new york state society of cpas. however, she collected almost $5 million in life insurance and was going to receive a substantial pension. she clearly could afford to pay for professional services and should not have been placed in the pool of people we were helping on a pro bono basis.
a third time was a person who had no money, but that was because the husband and wife both smoked two packs of cigarettes a day (adding up to $7,500 a year), paid $275 a month (or $3,300 per year) for cable television, had the latest $200 sneakers, and visited starbucks each morning (roughly $3,000 per year). in effect they spent $15,000 a year on nonessential items. i did help them because they were broke, but after meeting with them i had to have everything i was wearing sent to the dry cleaner to remove the smoke smell embedded in my clothes.
there were many legitimate organizations and some desperate people i helped. i felt good about that, but along the way there were some real clunkers.
one response to “when to say no to pro bono work”
rj sacbuoy
ed, it seems you needed to get some things off your chest. this might have been a better conversation over cocktails with a friend than a news column. this article spends too much time venting over personal past experiences and not enough time offering advice on exactly where to draw the line in our own practices. should we develop a rule of thumb that quickly determines when to say yes? handling each person’s individual sob story on a case-by-case basis often leads to saying “yes” more than we should (or making decisions based on our mood that day), so it would be helpful to come up with a way that takes the emotion of the moment out of the equation.