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| Benjamin Adams |
"It's weird that I think of service as selfish. But I get so much energy from those experiences, being able to help someone else," the in-house lawyer said during a recent interview with Law360 Pulse. "Giving my time, giving my energy leads to an amplification effect where I actually take more energy back from that sort of experience."
At the online payments company, Adams is chief commercial and IP counsel and executive sponsor for the global volunteer service program. In addition to spending time in the Peace Corps, service during his career has meant helping a woman from El Salvador secure special immigrant juvenile status, and sitting with a 16-year-old and her mother as the young woman completed a form at a name and gender change clinic.
"You're able to help someone through a time of difficulty or a crisis, leverage some of the skills that you have, and also walk away with your eyes maybe a little more open than they were before you had that experience," Adams said.
He added, "Service is something that I've always believed in."
Now he's one of at least 2,400 in-house and private practice lawyers lending their expertise for a nationwide pro bono remote legal clinic to assist tens of thousands of eligible Ukrainians in the U.S. with applying for temporary protected status during Russia's war on Ukraine. The U.S. government offers temporary status to foreign nationals whose home countries are considered unsafe, and provides the right to live and work in the U.S. for a certain period of time.
As Russia continues with its invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it would offer temporary protected status to Ukrainians who were in the U.S. as of March 1. The agency has since extended the cutoff date and now allows Ukrainians to apply for temporary status if they've been in the country since April 11.
Lawyers for Good Government and Kirkland & Ellis LLP are spearheading the pro bono clinic, officially known as the TPS Pro Bono Project for Ukraine, by first training attorneys on the immigration paperwork, then matching them with Ukrainians who are looking for help with the application process.
Beginning this coming week, Lawyers for Good Government will create the matchups and then provide assignments from there on a rolling basis. PayPal Holdings Inc., the Bank of New York Mellon Corp., Bristol Myers Squibb, General Electric Co., Ford Motor Co. and IBM are among the close to 50 companies participating in the clinic, according to Lawyers for Good Government. And there are about 80 law firms involved.
In the interview, Adams shares why PayPal got involved in the clinic and identified the main hurdle he thinks the volunteer lawyers could encounter with the application form. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did PayPal get involved?
Lawyers for Good Government has a listserv. They're routinely sending alerts for different initiatives in areas where they need support. This was one that struck a chord for us.
We sent an alert to our legal team for lawyers to volunteer for the clinic. Not only do these things take volunteer time; they also take resources. We're combining [the volunteer effort] with a monetary donation of $5,000 [to Lawyers for Good Government].
The next step is our lawyers participate in the training to become familiar with the basics of these immigration laws. Very few, if any, of the lawyers who are volunteering have deep expertise in immigration law. Most will be product lawyers or privacy lawyers or contract lawyers. But the lawyers can probably come up to speed in a relatively short time on the back of a training. Ukrainian individuals otherwise would be trying to complete the forms themselves.
Why did this particular effort strike a chord with PayPal?
PayPal operates in 200 countries. We think of ourselves as a global organization. We have business across the markets impacted.
In a separate initiative on the business side, PayPal [in March] rolled out an expansion of services available in Ukraine [to provide customers with ways to send money quickly and securely to friends and family].
On the legal pro bono side, we're routinely looking for ways to engage across societal issues at large — immigration issues at the border, name and gender change clinics, minority-based small business clinics — and [find those] that our team members are plugged into and concerned about.
What's your role in the clinic?
In 2016, we started a formal pro bono program at PayPal. It aligns to our values. We believe in the importance of driving positive impact and making more inclusive economies.
Not only does this help us help others, but on the skills-based volunteering side it also allows our employees, lawyers and legal professionals to expand their skill set, engage in different ways on topics that they might not otherwise come across, or develop leadership skills or client-engagement skills that they might not otherwise have a chance to test.
[PayPal's program] recommends that everyone on the legal team target to provide at least 12 hours of service each year. We think about service in a broad way: traditional legal pro bono services, as well as community impact-type services such as volunteering at a school. But when we're trying to facilitate opportunities, we try to facilitate opportunities in the pro bono space.
Every site where we have three lawyers or more, we have a designated pro bono legal lead who works to facilitate opportunities at those sites. COVID-19 has allowed for more opportunities for virtual engagement. The individual site-by-site activities have become a little less important, and we can do things oftentimes at a national and sometimes global level as we engage our lawyers around the world.
Last year, we had about 60% who delivered 12 hours of service or more. We had participation from 80% of our team. That allowed us to provide more than 4,300 hours of pro bono service in total last year.
Our pro bono program has been growing consistently since 2016. We have consistently increased our commitment to pro bono, and are proud of what we accomplished in 2021. In 2022, we aim to continue to improve engagement and participation. For this year, we hope to see 75% or more meet or exceed 12 hours of volunteer time and get 90% of our legal staff to provide any amount of volunteer time.
What challenges do you think lawyers volunteering for the clinic could encounter?
The application Form I-821 goes into quite a bit of depth around eligibility standards. The last time I walked through eligibility standards, I was talking to a 16-year-old young woman, asking pretty awkward, challenging questions like, Have you ever been convicted of prostitution? Do you have any children? Things like that that are sort of nonsensical, but have to be asked and have to be answered.
Here, the eligibility standards go to, Have you been engaged in espionage or sabotage? Have you been engaged in stealing technology, certain criminal offenses? Have you ever trafficked controlled substances?
Some of this goes back to the importance at the outset of a pro bono engagement like this: When meeting someone for the first time, actually take the time to have an initial conversation to get to know the person you're talking to. Try to at least break the ice and start to develop a bit of repertoire before you're asking people to tell you a lot of personal details around their family situation, location. There are awkward questions around, Have you ever been or are you now a member of the Communist or other totalitarian party? Have you ever participated in Nazi persecution or genocide?
Some of these things don't always translate well. Lawyers for Good Government will be available to coach and guide. They'll start to see if there's a question that is, for example, somehow uniquely getting tripped up by the Ukrainian audience we're working with. They'll be in a great position to help us learn from each other as well, which I think is important.
There are positives to the clinic being virtual. But are there also downsides, such as missing face-to-face interaction with the individuals you're helping?
You're not doing this in a disconnected fashion. You're likely doing it with video. I think we've all gotten pretty good at developing relationships virtually.
I've done some of these clinics virtually; I've done some in person. I find in-persons obviously a little easier to connect. But the virtual ones have been as equally rewarding.
--Editing by Brian Baresch.
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