Legal commentator and retired attorney Mark Pulliam argued the modern concept of pro bono legal work at the nation’s largest law firms has shifted away from serving the public and has instead become a vehicle for advancing left-wing political causes.
During an appearance Monday on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Pulliam began by explaining the original meaning of the term “pro bono.”
“The full expression is pro bono publico, and that’s Latin for the public good,” Pulliam said. “And so what it means is a lawyer or a law firm engages in legal representation without compensation because it benefits the public to do so.”
Pulliam said pro bono work traditionally involved attorneys providing free legal services to individuals who could not afford representation.
“Back in the old days, this would mean that if you were a lawyer and a poor person needed help adjusting an insurance claim or needed a will or something within your purview, you would do it without compensation because it’s beneficial to the public,” he explained.
According to Pulliam, that mission has changed dramatically over the past few decades alongside the growth of what he described as “big law.”
“In the last 20 years, 20 to 30 years…it’s taken on a completely different conception, and this is simultaneous with the rise of what I call big law, which is the top tier of the legal profession,” Pulliam said.
Describing the nation’s largest law firms, Pulliam noted that they employ thousands of attorneys and generate enormous profits.
“The biggest law firms can have 3,000 lawyers each, and they make fabulous amounts of money,” Pulliam said. “The partners get paid, in some cases, tens of millions of dollars a year. First year associates now are starting getting paid over $200,000 a year, and so they are money machines. They’re like Goldman Sachs.”
Because of their financial resources, Pulliam said the firms can devote significant time to unpaid legal work.
“People have kinda come up with this best practice or industry standard of these big law firms should devote 5 percent of their total billable hours to pro bono activities,” he said. “If you take 5 percent of the billable hours of these top, let’s say 100 law firms, we’re talking about five million hours a year.”
Pulliam argued the overwhelming majority of those hours are devoted to progressive causes.
“That’s the full-time equivalent of a 2,500-lawyer law firm all engaged in activities that I would say are 95 percent left-wing activism,” he said.
Leahy asked Pulliam why major law firms pursue such cases; he said there are two primary reasons.
“In the Big Law culture, it’s, you wanna be regarded as a major player, and so if you honor this 5 percent commitment, then you get written up in all the trade magazines,” Pulliam said.
He added that recruiting elite law school graduates has become an even greater motivation.
“But the real cynical way is that you have to do it as a sop to recruit these law students,” Pulliam said. “There was a time when somebody would wanna go to work for Sullivan & Cromwell or Covington Burling because they wanted to represent corporations and engage in challenging work, to benefit those corporations. They all hate capitalism. They hate these corporations.”
“So you can only get them to work there if you dangle something, ‘Okay, we’ll pay you a couple hundred thousand dollars a year,’ and then you can pretend like you’re a social worker—that you work for legal aid, in your spare time,” he added.
Pulliam also cited a case from his former law firm as an example of what he views as the unintended consequences of modern pro bono litigation.
“So how bad is this? I have a particular anecdote from my old law firm that decided to take on as a pro bono case challenging the no camping ordinance that the City of Boise had,” Pulliam said.
He said the firm ultimately persuaded the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to rule that Boise’s ordinance violated the Eighth Amendment.
“They were ultimately able to roll over the city, take it to the Ninth Circuit, and got the Ninth Circuit to agree that the no camping ordinance was unconstitutional as a violation of the Eighth Amendment. And that became the law for the entire Ninth Circuit, which covers the entire Western United States, and this was in 2018,” Pulliam said.
Pulliam argued the ruling contributed to the growth of homeless encampments throughout the West Coast.
“That coincides with this plague of homeless encampments all over the West Coast,” he said. “Why did this happen? Because these cities had their hands tied ’cause they could no longer enforce vagrancy and other laws, and so they took over. The cities were being ruined.”
Pulliam noted that the ruling was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“In fact, it was so bad that California Governor Gavin Newsom literally begged the Supreme Court to overturn it, which finally happened in 2024,” Pulliam said. “So this is not in the public interest.”
Tune in now to The Michael Patrick Leahy Show – your AMERICA FIRST news talk!
– Watch LIVE here on X
– Watch LIVE on YouTube / Rumble / Roku / AppleTV
– Listen on Spotify
– Listen on WENO AM760 in Nashville
– Read more at @TheTNStarhttps://t.co/kAsaJgtwLE— Michael Patrick Leahy (@michaelpleahy) August 3, 2026
– – –
Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network.
