Pro Bono and Community Service Opportunities

Whether you want to help low-income clients with their legal problems or prepare Thanksgiving baskets for people in need, you’ll find a service niche at William & Mary Law School.   Our students’ initiative and their desire to serve, combined with the Law School’s citizen-lawyer tradition, produce a broad array of service opportunities.

Pro bono service – unpaid, non-credit bearing legal assistance to those unable to pay – takes many forms at William & Mary.  Recent initiatives include:

• Street Law:  William & Mary law students, serving on teams with lawyers from the law firm of Hunton & Williams, teach diverse and disadvantaged high school students in Richmond, Virginia, about substantive areas of law, the legal profession, and legal career pathways.
• Student Hurricane Network:  With financial and administrative support from the Law School, students organized spring break service trips in 2008 and 2009 to New Orleans, where they helped meet the ongoing legal needs of victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. 
• Student Legal Services:  Law students assist and provide referrals for members of the William & Mary community for a variety of legal problems.
• Students for the Innocence Project:  Assisting the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project’s efforts to exonerate wrongly-convicted inmates, students participate in investigation and research of claims of actual innocence.
• Williamsburg Community Legal Clinics:  Partnering with volunteers from the Williamsburg Bar Association and the Community Action Agency, students help low-income clients with matters involving bankruptcy, child support/custody, contracts, employment, immigration, landlord-tenant, restoration of driving privileges and voting rights, uncontested divorce, and wills and probate.
• Wills for Seniors: Students work with attorneys from the law firm of Williams Mullen to conduct intake interviews and help draft, execute, and witness wills for clients in Southeastern Virginia referred by the Peninsula Agency on Aging.

The range and breadth of our students’ nonlegal community service is as diverse as our students themselves.  They volunteer on campus, in greater Williamsburg, in their home communities, and throughout the United States and the world.  Indicative of students’ volunteerism is their participation in the Law School's Community Service Program.  During the 2007-08 and 2008-09 academic years, members of the William & Mary Law School community devoted a total of nearly 10,000 service hours for the  program, helping charitable, religious, civic, community, governmental, and educational organizations or causes.