This is a project exploring definitive factors that affects pro bono performance at big law firms.
The data is collected from the 2024 national report of American Lawyer Pro Bono Scoreboard. I then combined the pro bono data with the minority representation data and women in law data in 2024 Diversity Scorecard and financial data from Am Law 100 and Am Law 200.
Collection of the 2024 data was really simple (thankfully). They added a html table below their Tableau table so you could easily copy and paste them into your spreadsheet. The only hassle is probably matching the firm names because they're not documented the exact same way. For instance, 'O'Melveny & Myers' could be 'O'Melveny & Myers' or 'O'Melveny.' So most of my time was spent on fixing the VLOOKUP() errors and ensuring they capture the right firms.
I did a multivariable regression analysis with Am Law data and found that profit margin stands out to be a statistically significant factor for both percentage of lawyers performing more than 20 hours at a firm annually and average hours per lawyer.
In this analysis, I used percentage of lawyers performing more than 20 hours at a firm annually as a proxy for whether or how strong a firm's pro bono culture was, while average hours indicates how many total hours (gross revenue in pro bono terms).
I also found that while racial diversity does not as strongly affect pro bono culture at a firm, it is highly statistically significant and postively correlated with average hours per lawyer.