When Steven Schulman entered the legal profession in 1994 as an antitrust attorney, he knew he wanted to devote part of his career to public interest work.
At the time, pro bono work at large firms was relatively limited. He took cases when he could — a Social Security disability matter here, a housing conditions dispute there.
Then, in 1998, while an associate at Latham & Watkins in Washington, D.C., Schulman heard over lunch that a case was headed to trial and a volunteer was needed. He raised his hand.
Only afterward did he learn it was an immigration case.
His client was a pro-democracy activist from Nigeria who had been jailed and tortured under the Sani Abacha regime for supporting a political opponent. The Texas Lawbook agreed to refer to him as T.O.
Schulman hadn’t so much as taken an immigration law class. No one at the firm had experience with immigration court. He leaned on a stack of papers about two feet high he’d received from the international nonprofit Human Rights First that contained information about his client’s case, country conditions and asylum law.
A decade later, after securing asylum for T.O. and his family and watching him become a U.S. citizen, Schulman made a confession. Sitting in the naturalization office waiting for the swearing-in ceremony, Schulman recalls saying, “I guess I can tell you now that you’re becoming a citizen, I didn’t really know what I was doing when I took your case.”
“Oh, I knew that,” T.O. replied. “But I trusted you.”
Today, Schulman leads the pro bono practice at Akin Gump from Dallas. Over the course of his career, he has watched pro bono work at large firms transform from a relatively small part of practice — less than 1 million hours nationwide in 1994 — to more than 5 million hours annually, a shift that mirrors his own journey to one of the country’s leading pro bono advocates.
American Lawyer data provided by Schulman — who is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Southern California Gould School of Law and SMU Dedman School of Law — show pro bono participation has far outpaced lawyer growth over that period. While the number of lawyers grew nearly 175 percent, total pro bono hours increased 429 percent.
Colleagues say Schulman has helped drive that growth, leveraging his role to shape not only Akin’s pro bono program but also the broader legal profession’s approach to public service.
“Steve really has two leadership roles … Within the firm he has the role of pro bono partner but in the larger legal community he has a leadership role and that’s significant,” said Susan Hoffman, public service partner at Crowell & Moring and one of Schulman’s mentors.
He helped bridge a divide between legal aid organizations and corporate law firms by bringing the groups together and encouraging frank conversations about how they could better work together, she said.
For the past decade, Schulman has organized an annual letter signed by leaders of more than 100 law firms urging Congress to increase funding for the Legal Services Corporation, the federally funded nonprofit that supports civil legal aid organizations nationwide. In Texas, those organizations are Lone Star Legal Aid, Legal Aid of NorthWest Texas and Texas RioGrande Legal Aid.
“Steve has more of a global view where he’s used his position to be able to expand pro bono work,” Hoffman said. “I think that makes Steve really unique among pro bono counsel.”
Reflecting on the last three decades, Schulman points to several developments that fueled the expansion of pro bono work and outlines where he hopes pro bono culture will go from here.
From ‘Hey Joe, Pro Bono’ to Schulman’s ‘Best Lawyering’
In 1980, Congress prohibited federally funded legal aid organizations from representing many noncitizens and the 1996 appropriations law imposed additional restrictions. Those changes created a greater need for pro bono representation.
Also in 1996, the Washington, D.C.-based Pro Bono Institute was founded with the goal of encouraging law firms to institutionalize pro bono work. Founder Esther Lardent often described the previous approach as “Hey Joe, pro bono,” Schulman said, because attorneys would simply ask, “Hey Joe, can you take this case?” Three years earlier, Lardent had launched the Law Firm Pro Bono Challenge, and the institute was created to administer the initiative while providing guidance and consulting services to firms.
The experience representing T.O. prompted Schulman to take more immigration cases. He also persuaded colleagues to volunteer, eventually supervising their work.
Within three years, Schulman had handled about a dozen asylum cases. Meanwhile, Latham signed on to the Pro Bono Challenge to commit at least 60 hours per lawyer each year. Schulman joined the firm’s D.C. pro bono committee, and, alongside mentor Bill Kelly, helped build the office’s pro bono practice.
Schulman felt he was in the right place at the right time. D.C. had a burgeoning community of pro bono counsel, and Schulman became part of a network of lawyers working to professionalize pro bono practice.
He met Hoffman, who had become the nation’s first pro bono counsel when she joined Crowell & Moring in 1988.
Hoffman recalled that lawyers, including Schulman, often told her they wanted her job. “You have to wait for me to die,” she would reply.
Schulman decided he wouldn’t wait that long.
In 2001, he proposed creating a pro bono counsel position at Latham. The firm agreed, making him its first pro bono counsel. That December, The American Lawyer featured Schulman on the cover with two of T.O.’s sons. “Latham’s New Leaf,” the magazine cover said. “In just six years, Latham & Watkins has transformed a mediocre pro bono program into one of the nation’s strongest.”
Schulman’s position, however, was only half-time. Schulman continued practicing antitrust and white collar criminal litigation while overseeing pro bono, creating a feeling that he couldn’t give his all to either practice.
“I was doing well with both, but I also felt like I couldn’t become the leader I wanted to become,” Schulman said.
He left Latham for a job at a plaintiff’s antitrust class action firm — hated it, he said — and went back to Latham. By then, the pro bono counsel role had been filled, leaving him to his antitrust and white collar practice. Throughout that period, he continued talking with firms about creating full-time pro bono leadership roles.
In January 2006, Schulman called Akin’s then-chairman, R. Bruce McLean, after seeing a posting for a staff attorney to run the D.C. office’s pro bono program.
“I said, ‘I see what you’re advertising. I’m not interested in that position. I want to be a partner and I want to run the whole firm’s pro bono practice,’” Schulman recalled saying.
McLean invited him to submit a proposal, which led to a meeting with Kim Koopersmith, then head of the partnership admissions committee and later the firm’s chair. She had seen him on the cover of The American Lawyer and it got her thinking about what firms could do to shape a better world for people in need of legal services.
During their meeting, Koopersmith was impressed with his plan and his understanding of pro bono at such a nascent time.
“I was completely and totally taken with not just Steve the man, but Steve the visionary,” Koopersmith said.
By August, Schulman joined Akin as its first full-time pro bono partner.
“Steven is a well-known champion of pro bono representation with a proven track record in managing a successful firmwide program. We are very pleased to have him focusing on pro bono on a full-time basis,” McLean said in a press release.
In that same announcement, Schulman called the opportunity to lead the firm’s practice full-time “a dream come true.”
“I like to say my best lawyering was convincing Akin to hire me as a pro bono partner without any promise of money,” Schulman said.
Becoming the Go-To ‘Big Guns’
The same year he started with Akin, the Association of Pro Bono Counsel was created, which he believes added to the growth of pro bono. The association — which he has twice led as president — has since become a central professional organization for law firm pro bono leaders. It has grown from about 50 members to about 400, Schulman said.
When he arrived at Akin, Schulman was a department of one. There was no pro bono counsel, no coordinator. A secretary would occasionally lend him some help.
But McLean and Koopersmith gave him the time, autonomy and backing to build the practice. Their initial goal was ambitious. They set out to average 60 pro bono hours per lawyer in 2007, Schulman’s first full year. He remembers questioning whether the firm should establish interim benchmarks, but they insisted on aiming for the long-term goal.
They met their goal, and have met each year’s goal since, Schuman said, with the firm reaching as high as 118 average hours per lawyer.
The law firm culture was a big part of the success, Schulman said, coming in as partner.
“People in the partnership accepted me as a partner, even though I was this odd duck who was coming to the firm not to make any money,” he said.
In 2007, Akin became part of the legal team representing Bolivian families in Mamani v. Sánchez de Lozada, alongside Harvard’s International Human Rights Clinic. The lawsuit — the first to bring a former head of state to trial in the U.S. for alleged human rights abuses — sought to hold former Bolivian President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and his defense minister accountable for extrajudicial killings carried out by the Bolivian military during civil unrest in September and October 2003.
Among the legal team were Joseph Sorkin, now the firm’s head of litigation, and James Tysse, now co-leader of the firm’s administrative and regulatory litigation practice.
Sorkin tried the case and obtained a $10 million jury verdict. After the verdict was later vacated, Tysse argued before the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which returned the case to the district court. The jury verdict was reinstated, appealed again and ultimately resolved through a settlement in 2023, 16 years after the litigation began.
McLean and Koopersmith also gave Schulman broad latitude to develop new initiatives.
In 2007, the firm’s D.C. hiring partner asked him to mentor a group of first-year law students spending the summer at Akin by giving them experience with pro bono matters.
At the end of the summer, Schulman proposed creating a formal program that would place first-year law students at legal aid organizations for most of their summer before bringing them back to Akin as second-year summer associates.
The firm approved the idea.
Schulman traveled the country recruiting candidates, and in 2008 Akin launched its Pro Bono Scholars Program with six summer associates.
The program has since grown to 138 participants in the U.S. and expanded to the U.K. in 2018.
One of those scholars would become central to another defining chapter in the firm’s pro bono work.
After the Obama administration opened a family detention center in Karnes County, southeast of San Antonio, in 2014, immigration attorney Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch called Schulman with a request to help the women being held there.
“I’ve been an immigration lawyer in Texas through many presidential administrations and many crises and every time there’s a horrible crisis and we need to bring in the big guns to defend people, I think of Steven and I think of Akin Gump,” Lincoln-Goldfinch said.
Schulman joined a group of lawyers who toured the detention center and quickly realized there was no coordinated pro bono effort to represent the detained mothers and children.
Schulman thought of Lauren Connell.
Connell, one of Akin’s Pro Bono Scholars, had worked as an immigration paralegal before law school, spoke fluent Spanish and had recently graduated. She was preparing to begin her career in the firm’s New York corporate practice.
Schulman set out to recruit her to the case.
He called Koopersmith, who told him to get approval from the head of the corporate practice. Within 24 hours, he had it. The firm rented Connell an apartment and a car in San Antonio, allowing her to spend three dedicated months there.
Over the years, more than 100 Akin lawyers represented dozens of detained women and children. Because of the immigration court backlog and other delays, the firm still represents some clients from that period.
One of the most significant cases to emerge from the Karnes effort involved Sindy Marilu Alvarez Lagos and her daughter, who fled Honduras after receiving repeated threats from gangs.
Alvarez-Lagos testified during her removal hearing that she and her then-7-year-old daughter were threatened with gang rape, genital mutilation and death in their Honduran neighborhood if they failed to comply with the extortion demands of a Barrio 18 gang member. Barrio 18 effectively controlled the neighborhood and its residents. Thomas J. Boerman, a gang researcher and expert witness, testified that in Honduras’ patriarchal society, unmarried women are especially vulnerable to gang violence. He opined that Barrio 18 targeted Alvarez-Lagos because of her status as an unprotected woman and further testified the gang would likely interpret her refusal to pay as an act of political opposition.
The case resulted in a precedential Fourth Circuit decision in 2019 holding that the Board of Immigration Appeals had applied too narrow a view of the nexus requirement and recognized that an unmarried mother threatened by gangs could establish persecution on account of a protected ground and showed that gang-related persecution was not categorically barred.
Big Law has a unique ability to bring both financial resources and sophisticated legal expertise to people who otherwise might not have access to either, Lincoln-Goldfinch said. Akin, led by Schulman, has been particularly effective at putting those resources to work for people in need, she said.
In August 2021, Schulman and his partner, Anna Friesenhahn, a legal recruiter, were driving cross-country to Dallas after she accepted a new job. Their rental car was packed with bottles of wine and liquor and a collection of houseplants — items, Schulman said, that the movers wouldn’t transport.
Then the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan.
As the humanitarian crisis unfolded, Friesenhahn took over driving while Schulman worked from the passenger seat, coordinating evacuation efforts and preparing humanitarian parole applications.
The experience differed from the pro bono efforts he had handled before.
Typically, Akin’s clients were referred by legal aid organizations. This time, one client working at the Afghan Embassy in D.C. sent embassy officials and their relatives and friends who were desperately seeking help to Schulman.
By the end of the effort, Akin had represented more than 100 Afghans and their family members, including much of Afghanistan’s diplomatic corps and the country’s ambassador to the U.S., Adela Raz, Schulman said.
From Attorney to ‘Uncle Steve’
Today, Akin has five dedicated pro bono professionals in its U.S. offices — three full-time lawyers, a coordinator and a specialist. The firm’s addition of immigration attorney Rená Cutlip-Mason last year reflects a broader trend of firms adding subject-matter specialists to support pro bono practices.
“Pro bono is historically part of what the legal profession does. I think Steve brought in an era of professionalizing it, maximizing the impact, organizing people, creating a cohort of leaders at a large number of firms so that you could work together and figure out what are the best practices, share what works, and help not-for-profit organizations to be able to utilize pro bono at large law firms successfully,” said Koopersmith, who retired from partnership last year.
Even after three decades of phenomenal growth, Schulman believes the profession has room to go further.
He would like to see law schools explore making the third year a clinical experience, similar to medical school residences. He also wants transactional attorneys, who make up an increasing share of large firms, to feel empowered to take on meaningful pro bono cases, including in contentious matters.
These days, Schulman’s own pro bono practice focuses primarily on immigration, though he is also working on a case in Oregon challenging the use of solitary confinement.
He has remained in contact with many of his clients.
Earlier this year, T.O.’s now 34-year-old son texted Schulman a photo. Addressing him as “Uncle Steve,” he shared the news that he had proposed to his girlfriend.
Looking back, Schulman believes his career would have unfolded differently had he not volunteered for T.O.’s asylum case all those years ago. Schulman is quick to acknowledge that timing also played a role. He entered the profession just as major law firms were beginning to institutionalize pro bono work, and he was surrounded by mentors and colleagues who were becoming their firms’ first pro bono leaders.
Still, it all started with a single case.
“I had the great fortune of taking a case that challenged me,” Schulman said, “that made me want to come back and do more right away.”