Private Law Firms as Transnational Advocates

In recent decades, top private law firms have increasingly offered their services as advocates for societal needs at no or low cost—big law pro bono. Firms have taken on more pro bono activities, professionally organized those in-house, and done so over a wider geography, including at the international stage, in the Global South, and in contexts where civic space is shrinking.

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While traditionally engaging in litigation, pro bono lawyers have now expanded towards a broader range of advocacy strategies for human rights and environmental causes: they train and educate stakeholders, they advise international institutions and non-profit organizations, and they engage in institution-building. To do so, they rely on powerful resources, not least lawyers who went to the best law schools, ever-increasing revenues, and highly influential networks. However, we lack systematic knowledge on how big law does good and with what implications.

Big law in a shrinking civic space

PROBONO is a timely study of how big law affects change in times of rising populism and authoritarianism. With an ongoing crackdown on civil society in all parts of the globe, funding crises in international institutions and NGOs alike, and growing pressure for marketization on defenders of human rights and global justice, the future of the field of transnational advocacy depends on actors with access to restrictive contexts and the resources to navigate legal and political challenges.

In the face of these restraints, law firms are potentially valuable allies for civil society and international institutions alike in pushing for solutions and transformative change on issues such as human rights and environmental degradation. However, their resources depend on clients that may challenge the very norms they purport to protect through their pro bono work. Furthermore, autocratic developments and the politicization of pro bono work may influence how law firms engage pro bono to address societal needs, and which needs are deemed appropriate to defend.

Work plan

PROBONO seeks to understand these dynamics and their implications through three key questions:

1. How does Big Law do pro bono?

2. How does autocratization impact pro bono?

3. What are the implications for human rights, democracy, and international politics?

The project breaks new ground by bringing scholarship from International Relations, Political Economy, and Law together to study private law firms as transnational advocates in the context of autocratization and shrinking civic space.

The project team will collect and analyze unique quantitative and qualitative data, and conduct in-depth case studies on big law pro bono for human rights and environmental causes across different jurisdictions.

The picture shows an overview of the work plan for the PROBONO project. In Work Package 1: Organizing pro bono, the project team will create a database of the global top 100 firms (2015-2025), through content analysis of websites, reports and social media. In Work Package 2: Practicing pro bono, the project team will conduct case studies on pro bono activities and how firms respond to autocratization through field work, interviews and document analyses. In Work Package 3: Implications of pro bono, the project team will conduct a normative analysis of findings to assess implications.

PROBONO glossary

PROBONO has developed a glossary of relevant terms. You can access the full glossary here.

Published Oct. 29, 2024 2:00 PM - Last modified Mar. 2, 2026 9:06 AM