Pro Bono Innovators 2022 Honoree Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld

Your firm worked on key matters such as helping Afghans apply for humanitarian parole, providing legal consultations to migrants at the US/Mexico border, and the remote clinic partnership with Mississippi Center for Justice in helping 50 citizens expunge their records. How did your firm strategize on how to approach these matters?

Our remote legal clinic strategy evolved as we gained more experience serving our client populations remotely. Our first remote effort was a pre-pandemic partnership with Mississippi Center for Justice, helping 50 nonviolent and first-time offenders expunge their records. We used lessons from that clinic to help us build a more expansive clinic during the pandemic serving hundreds of applicants eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the federal program for qualified undocumented individuals.

For that clinic, we utilized Salesforce Quip for the first time, a platform that allowed us to remotely reach our client population. Quip became integral to our firm’s work; upon the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan last year, we were able to quickly pivot to create a humanitarian parole clinic on the Quip platform, which helped us reach Afghan applicants virtually.

For each project, we tailored the format to the client population and the scale of work that needed to be done. Our first foray into the remote clinic model was our expungement clinic with Mississippi Center for Justice (MCJ). That pre-pandemic clinic was relatively low-tech; we used phone calls and emails to communicate with clients and with MCJ. That model worked well because it required relatively limited exchange of information and documentation for each matter.

Our next remote project, a DACA clinic, needed a fresh approach because the documentation involved in an initial DACA application is much more substantial. When we considered this need, plus the youthfulness of the DACA client population, we determined that using an app-based platform on a smartphone would work best, so we collaborated with our IT department to determine the best tech solution.

What were the most innovative aspects of these matters in your view? And who took the lead on driving innovation with the work?

Our Pro Bono team collaborated with our IT department to drive innovation and determine the solutions to serve our needs for each given project.

For our DACA clinic, our IT department directed us to Quip, a Salesforce product. Quip enabled us to collaborate securely with both our legal services partner, CASA, and our DACA clinic clients. First, the platform gave us total control over who was able to access the DACA clinic. We provisioned user profiles for only those involved in the DACA project, which included the Akin legal team, the clients, and CASA.

Second, within the platform, Quip allowed us to create a distinct case file for each client and to set permissions for each file. This ensured that sensitive information was shared only with the client, their Akin legal team, and with CASA. Likewise, Quip enabled us to message directly with the client, and these communications were visible only to those individuals who had permission to view the file.

Finally, the client could upload supporting documents directly to their case file on Quip, and the Akin legal team could likewise upload immigration form drafts for the client to review. This meant that documents with personally identifiable information were not being shared via email and were contained in one central location. Crucially, Quip allowed us to design custom templates for our clinic, which allowed our DACA clients to upload voluminous supporting documents using only their smartphone camera and the Quip app.

When the Afghanistan crisis happened in August 2021, we were able to redeploy Quip to help Afghans apply for humanitarian parole. With our software infrastructure already in place, all we needed to do was adapt our templates for the humanitarian parole process. This allowed us to deploy volunteers quickly to serve Afghans in need.

Tell us more about the impact of the matters on the local, national, and/or global level.

Each of our remote projects allowed us to deliver services efficiently to a sizable client population in locations where we did not have a physical presence. Our most recent project, leading a multi-firm effort to provide legal consultations to migrants at the US/Mexico border, is perhaps the clearest example.

Our program served individuals subject to the now-defunct “Remain in Mexico” program, also known as Migrant Protection Protocols, or “MPP”), which required asylum seekers to remain in Mexico until their immigration court trials, unless they qualified for a categorical exclusion, or could demonstrate a fear of persecution in Mexico. Over the course of nearly eight months, we advised close to 3,000 migrants, hundreds of whom were exempted from MPP due to our intervention.

Why do you think your team ultimately achieved successful results?

We strive to think beyond what we know and to come up with inventive ways to resolve our clients’ problems. Our approach is collaborative, engaging key internal and external stakeholders, which has included our IT department, legal services partners, the US government and other major law firms.

As we recognized the impact of our remote clinic projects, which served 50 individuals in Mississippi in our expungement project and over 400 immigrant youth in our DACA clinic, we built out our Pro Bono Team, promoting an intern in our DACA clinic to a newly created role of pro bono clinics specialist. This allowed us to develop more proactively remote opportunities and gave us the bandwidth to assume our leading role in the MPP project, which ultimately served nearly 3000 individuals at the US/Mexico border from January to August 2022.

Importantly, at every turn, we did not let our past work dictate our future plans. Instead, we sought to build on past experiences to address the new issues we encountered and adapt to our clients’ needs.

Take us back to the time the matters were resolved. What did you do to celebrate?

We have an annual firmwide Pro Bono Awards ceremony hosted by our chairperson, Kim Koopersmith, that honors Akin Gump attorneys and staff who go above and beyond in their pro bono practice. It is a joyous celebration that brings everyone in the firm together, and we also hold charitable auctions in several offices to benefit legal services partners and pro bono client organizations.

Over the past several years, we have honored the associates who spearheaded our expungement clinic, the IT professional who took on the DACA clinic challenge, and several colleagues who stepped in to aid Afghans in need. We look forward to celebrating the accomplishments of the MPP project at next year’s ceremony.

Responses provided by Lauren Connell, Akin Gump pro bono counsel; and Steven Schulman, pro bono partner.

—With assistance from Kibkabe Araya.