The Fifty-Hour Benchmark

The Fifty-Hour Benchmark

Rule 6.1 puts a number on the aspiration: "A lawyer should aspire to render at least (50) hours of pro bono publico legal services per year."¹ The number does real work. A bare instruction to do some pro bono work invites the answer that some has been done, while a stated figure gives each lawyer a yardstick for measuring a year of practice. The figure still carries the character of the Rule as a whole. It is an aspiration addressed to the lawyer's professional conscience, and a lawyer who falls short of it faces no disciplinary sanction.

Comment 1 governs how the figure is applied. It recognizes that "in some years a lawyer may render greater or fewer hours than the annual standard specified," and it asks each lawyer to render the stated number "on average per year" over the course of a legal career.² The fifty hours is therefore a career average, not a quota that resets every January. A year swallowed by a long trial does not count as a failure if the lawyer makes up the difference in later years. Averaging keeps the commitment steady across a career and leaves room for years that run unevenly.

Two questions run through every problem on this topic, and they should be kept apart: has the lawyer met the expectation, and can the lawyer be sanctioned? A stem that reports one light year with heavier years around it describes a lawyer who is still tracking the benchmark. A stem that reports a low average over decades describes a lawyer who has missed it. In neither case does the shortfall expose the lawyer to discipline.

The number is a benchmark, and a jurisdiction can choose a different one for its own lawyers. In a challenge brought by a Florida lawyer named Schwarz, the court found "an adequate nexus" between aspirational pro bono goals for Florida Bar members and the Florida Supreme Court's legitimate interest in encouraging legal services for the indigent.³ The court described Florida's goal of twenty hours per year as "not terribly onerous." Such a goal gives individual lawyers a benchmark for judging how many hours they should be performing, and it suggests that service to the poor can be fitted in alongside the other demands on a lawyer's time.⁴ Florida's twenty hours and the Model Rule's fifty therefore do not conflict. Each is a yardstick set for the lawyers of a particular jurisdiction, and a question about the Model Rule calls for fifty.