As many lawyers know from experience, pro bono work can be valuable and rewarding.

It offers the opportunity to provide legal services to people and organizations that could not ordinarily afford them.

But as the demands on in-house legal departments grow—and economic uncertainty can mean tighter budgets and shrinking workforces—it becomes harder to find time to create the space for your team to participate.

In my nearly two years as chief legal and compliance officer at Commvault, I’ve found a two-part solution to support a pro bono program.

First, it helps to align the work with your company’s core mission.

A second critical step is to block out the noise that can make it hard for your team to peel away from their day-to-day duties.

With this approach, you’re not only adhering to the principle of pro bono—“for the good”—but you’re making your good work good for the company and each other, too.

A more-focused mission

Our pro bono program began in the traditional way. We partnered with two organizations that operate online resources for legal needs such as helping nonprofits set up corporations.

We also decided to focus specifically on what we’re good at, where we can offer our expertise—the knowledge and skills that we’re fine-tuning every single day—to people who need but who otherwise wouldn’t be able to access it. In our case, that meant the data protection industry.

For example, we’ve been working with Freeze.com, a startup that has a mission to protect and control consumer data privacy and identity.

Freeze’s promise is that we all have the right to ask any company to stop selling our personal information and delete it, but few people can figure out how to do it.

Freeze has created a technology to do just that—they know how to communicate with companies on our behalf and have our digital information erased from the internet. As a privacy professional, I view this as a worthy mission.

Our legal professionals have spent time with the Freeze team discussing data privacy regulations, best-in-class consumer protection programs and other relevant topics they should consider as they continue to develop their technology.

Commvault has no financial or other interest in the company, and of course the legal team that participated in this work was not compensated at all. We chose to help because we’re good at this, and Freeze has a mission we believe in.  

Though no money exchanged hands, we did benefit.

Team members who don’t have exposure to these discussions and debates participate with me and our senior lawyers and receive feedback on their work. 

This is particularly valuable because most of our team are not attorneys; some are currently in law school or would like to attend, but all of us are people who love the work of legal compliance and data privacy.

It’s incredible training for them and opens the door to sample other types of work, functioning as an in-house internship, and it’s helping our whole team become stronger. 

Blocking out the noise

I’ve realized that a significant portion of what comes at us every workday—emails, meetings, check-ins, texts—is noise. If you can identify the noise and not participate in it, you’ve just bought yourself precious time.

We work together as a team to quiet the noise—whether that’s determining that a call doesn’t need someone from legal on it or that a situation needs to ripen before we get too involved.

We also teach the team to identify emotionally charged situations, whether calls or in e-mails—and that a good use of our involvement can be to help deescalate so the team can focus on reaching solutions together.

When you’re able to offer time and talent to work outside your day job, it helps to bring this perspective to your work and your relationships.

I am fortunate that Commvault’s CEO Sanjay Mirchandani is committed to philanthropy in his own life, and he was quick to see that if we built something around work that we love, it would become something special.

Commitment from the top makes all the difference.