New initiative aims to boost pro bono work in Indiana

At a time when about half of Indiana’s attorneys do not do pro bono work, Pro Bono Indiana has launched a new, comprehensive website to provide attorneys and law students across the state with the training and resources to foster growth.

The site, indianaprobononetwork.org, launched last week. It provides a platform where the civil legal aid programs in the state, including Pro Bono Indiana’s 11 districts, Indiana Legal Services and local legal aid societies, post opportunities for attorneys, paraprofessionals and law students to provide pro bono services to low-income Hoosiers.

Pro Bono Indiana unveiled the platform at a launch party last week.

“This is the site that I wish I had,” Dana Luetzelschwab, the associate director for attorney and volunteer support at PBI, said during the event.

New opportunities

After obtaining a roughly $50,000 grant from the Indiana Bar Foundation last summer, Pro Bono Indiana got to work to address a major challenge: attorney confusion over where to find pro bono opportunities.

Historically, the Indiana Legal Help website, which is still active, provided attorney-focused resources via a “Get Involved” link, which used Paladin, a software program designed to connect law firms, corporations and law schools with legal service organizations. It was intended to serve both clients and attorneys.

PBI Executive Director Scott Wylie said that although Indiana Legal Help has been successful for clients, it became so client-facing that attorneys didn’t recognize it as a place to find volunteering opportunities.

“We didn’t invest on the attorney side very well,” Wylie said.

But it was that failure to attract attorney engagement that drove Pro Bono Indiana to create a new resource focused entirely on serving attorneys, particularly younger ones.

“Many lawyers, and especially lawyers in their first 20 years of practice, have gravitated more and more across the United States to engaging with opportunities for pro bono work through technology platforms,” Wylie said. “The old model of having a staff member at a legal aid program call you on the telephone and explain a case to you and ask you to take it — a lot of folks just are not willing to engage in those types of communication forms.”

Wylie emphasized that this new model is intended to help attorneys better match their specific interests with pro bono work, in hopes that they might be more likely to take on volunteer cases.

“The ability to go onto the site and search by legal subject matter area, by geography or other areas that meet what they’re wanting to do will hopefully provide us more volunteers across the entire state,” Wylie said.

The platform is not just for practicing attorneys; supervised law students and legal clerks can also use the site.

Justice Vaughn, a student at Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law who attended the launch party, said she’s enthusiastic about what the new site will offer and looks forward to taking advantage of its resources.

“I think it is kind of the next step [for] new attorneys being able to reach out when they would like to do pro bono and have kind of a generalized resource bank,” Vaughn, who is soon to graduate, said. “It’ll definitely get things started in Indiana.”

Challenges in pro bono

According to the Indiana Coalition for Court Access, from 2019 to 2024, just over 50% of Indiana attorneys who were eligible to report pro bono data — with exceptions for government employees and judicial officers — reported offering their time and resources for volunteer legal aid.

Compared with the rest of the country, Indiana ranks in the middle in terms of reporting percentages, Wylie said.

“We have a lot of potential increase that is available if we can better utilize and find those folks who are either choosing not to do pro bono right now, or who, if the right opportunity came to them, might do pro bono now,” Wylie said.

In 2024, 8,047 attorneys contributed time or money to pro bono legal services, according to the Coalition for Court Access’ recently published report. This means that 7,482 attorneys reported no contribution of money or hours.

These numbers have been relatively consistent for several years.

The number of monetary contributions from Indiana attorneys for pro bono services increased from $775,000 in 2015 to $1.5 million in 2019. For 2024, attorneys contributed about $1.6 million.

On a national scale, most attorneys in the U.S. have provided pro bono service at some point in their careers, according to a 2024 American Bar Association report.

Wylie attributes Indiana’s lower reporting numbers to a couple of factors, including the rural attorney shortage.

“It’s very difficult for a newer attorney to financially support a practice in many of our very sparsely populated counties,” Wylie said. “And so because of that, that’s made providing pro bono services in those areas very challenging.”

PBI operates Indiana Free Legal Answers, which allows attorneys from across the state to answer questions posed by Hoosiers on any given legal matter.

“That was the first really entrée where we understood how people from larger urban areas could help rural communities,” Wylie said.

The new platform is one part of ongoing work to ensure that there are many opportunities for law professionals to volunteer in Indiana.

“My dream is not that an attorney at Faegre Drinker in Indianapolis will help that client in Loogootee, but that attorney in Loogootee will help a poor person in Indianapolis,” Wylie said at the site’s launch party.

One reason why some attorneys have not pursued pro bono work is the fear of failing to provide acceptable services in areas they don’t understand well, Wylie said.

Unlike in criminal cases, individuals are not generally guaranteed a right to an attorney in civil matters. And some areas for which individuals request pro bono assistance include the more technical legal fields, such as bankruptcy and evictions.

“People want to do pro bono work, but they don’t want to commit malpractice,” said Kerry Bennett, chief legal counsel for the Indiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence, during a live demonstration of the website at last week’s launch party.

But PBI seeks to ease those worries by providing free, detailed training and resources on a variety of topics on the new website — with more to be added in time.

“We come out of law school, and there’s a running joke: They teach us how to think and not how to actually act as an attorney,” Vaughn, the McKinney student, said. “So everyone comes out, and they’re a little bit insecure in their abilities.”

But she is confident that the Pro Bono Network’s resources would help address those early anxieties, she said.

An organic platform

Luetzelschwab cautioned that out of the gate, the site might appear sparse. That’s because it’s intended to be an organic system.

“This is going to be a constant process of adding more content, adding more links, adding more information,” Luetzelschwab said. “And people say, ‘Hey, have you thought about adding this?’ I can add it. This is a living program.”

Luetzelschwab also stressed that it is important for civil legal aid providers and bar-related organizations to keep feeding the site with information by posting opportunities, adding events or flagging resources for her to add.

To access the training resources, attorneys must register on the site with their bar number or other attorney license identification. It is free to sign up and use.•