Pro Bono Passion Perseveres Pre- and Post-Pandemic with Fawaz Bham

Episode Notes

Transcript

Fawaz Bham:

Obviously the ultimate success of seeing your clients leaving with joy in their eyes as opposed to fear when they come in, they’ve never sat down with a professional before. Seeing the joy in their eyes when they leave the session is incredible and that’s what keeps me motivated and that’s the story I keep sharing with law students, young lawyers, senior lawyers, even of this is what everyone needs to be doing. If everyone did a little bit more, we would be so much better off in the United States.

Mitch Winick:

These inspiring words are those of Fawaz Bham, the 2024 American Bar Association Pro Bono Publico Award recipient, and our guest today on SideBar

Announcer:

SideBar, is brought to you by Monterey College of Law, San Luis Obispo College of Law, Kern County College of Law, empire College of Law, located in Santa Rosa and the colleges of law with campuses in Santa Barbara and Ventura. Welcome to SideBar featuring conversations about optimism in action with lawyers and leaders inspiring change. And now your co-hosts Jackie Gardina and Mitch Winick

Mitch Winick:

Was we’d like to start with a little bit about you. You’re in a large firm in Dallas. We know the type of pressures there are to have billable hours. You could fill all of your time just doing that and the law firm would be happy. What has motivated you to get involved in this type of volunteer legal work?

Fawaz Bham:

Absolutely. It’s funny because almost all of us, I think as aspiring law students that are in the pipeline, we’re always thinking of the reasons of why we went to law school. I’m a hiring partner at my firm. It’s a question I always ask to understand motivations. Why did you pick this crazy profession that’s so demanding, right? What pulls you in? And inevitably the answer is, I wanted to do more than what was just being asked of me. And I knew that having a law degree opens up so many doors to do so much good that other people can’t do in undergrad going through college. That came to the surface pretty quick. My dad is a small business owner here in Texas now retired, and I saw firsthand trying to get answers to small business questions. Really simple. Innocent ones were difficult to find, right? You could do a Google search, you could get a variety of different answers and it was somewhat disheartening and I remember in my early years kind of formulating, well, okay, we need to change a lot of things.

There are a lot of causes to pursue, but it’s interesting that small businesses kind of face this uphill climb of having to engage council and spend a lot of money that they don’t have to get some basic questions and get some basic orientation off the ground. So really when I got into law school devoted some time to getting pretty decent in my studies and graduating, one of the top criteria is of figuring out where I was going to practice. And part of my summer associate experience as well was trying to find a home where I could cultivate that need, that desire to go out in the community and actually affect change in a variety of different causes. And it became very apparent real quick that hunt Andrew’s growth rose to the top and I’m very fortunate that I was able to summer with them, start right off my legal career with them and I’ve stayed with them. That’s really what got me motivated to start peeling back the onion on how do we get into the community and really start championing some really great causes.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie and I are both deans of what we call opportunity law schools here in California. That category of school doesn’t exist in the other states, but one of the things we do in our programs is from the beginning, get our students engaged in the community, bring in lawyers like yourself who talk to the students, get them excited. Since ours are evening programs and the students are working during the day, it’s even harder for them to find that opportunity. And yet they do, which is really very, very heartening. And Jackie’s stories I suspect not all that unlike yours. Jackie, you got engaged very early in public service.

Jackie Gardina:

I was thinking when you were talking FOAs about all the personal statements I read about want to be attorneys, the applicants to the law school, and inevitably the story involves some intersection in their early lives with the legal system or the court system that was either incredibly positive and they want to emulate that or it was negative and they want to make sure it’s not repeated or that they can do it differently than how they experienced it. I think that story of wanting to create change is a common one for anyone who’s entering law school. It sounds incredibly familiar because it was mine as well. I wanted the tools to make systemic change and not just individual change. The law provides that particular piece and what you’ve been doing in Dallas as an example of really creating systemic change while you’re also affecting individuals.

Mitch Winick:

And for us, I’d like to just focus on that for just a minute. I suspect most people don’t think of small business owners. When we think of this kind of large umbrella of access to justice and access to the law, we almost always narrow in directly on criminal law and individual rights. Talk a little more about your experience of business owners because that’s a lot of our audience are folks who serve business owners and are small business owners and why that seems so important to you.

Fawaz Bham:

You are absolutely Mitch. I mean what’s interesting there is when I got started with the firm pretty early on, you want to get some exposure to a variety of different pro bono work. So I started volunteering at intake clinics, I started preparing immigration applications. I would present kind of real estate 1 0 1 seminars and quickly that’s how I started formulating, well, how do we get in touch with these small business owners and what do they actually need? So in 2014, we were able to partner up with a community partner that helps small businesses and rising entrepreneurs try to navigate a variety of questions that they have, such as what entity formation should I be looking at? What is the difference between a corporation and LLC For an experience lawyer, that’s a very easy answer to give back and kind of break it down. But for a small business owner, rising entrepreneur, it feels like night and day and it feels like a choke point almost of, I don’t know, am I going to make the wrong decision if my decision today is that going to come back to bite me in five years?

How do I go about hiring my first employee? What is the tax structure that I’m going to now have to abide by because I am a small business owner. Most people don’t realize this, but we’ve all kind of heard the stats of how there’s only a finite amount of small businesses that actually survive three years, five years, 10 years into the future. So they really don’t have the capital to spend on hiring a team of lawyers sitting down and someone coming up with the pristine business plan. A lot of businesses are kind of built overnight on an idea and it starts to spring forward and before you know it, you’ve kind of forgotten about the legal implications and you’re just doing what business owners love, which is devoting time to the cause and taking care of the mission that they’ve come up with, but not paying much attention to the other items that quickly start to catch them up.

And that’s ultimately in so many situations that we would run into the thing that would bring them down that, okay, while the IRS is knocking on my door, the employee that I hired is asking for documentation that I am just not certain of anymore. I had handshake agreements with a bunch of vendors that are now reneging on their commitments and that’s jeopardizing my business. So we really were able to get a good insight into the real realities of so many different businesses and what they are struggling with. And so in 2014 when we got started, we started small and we’ve slowly over time grown that to a clinic that doesn’t have a per se income threshold requirement to come sit down with an attorney. You can sit down for a 15, 20 minute session, you can bring documents to the intake session. The attorneys that are volunteering their time are trained as general practitioners that can advise and start talking and brainstorming with the business owner right then and there about this is what you should be thinking of, you actually do need a tax attorney expertise, so you need to go over here or you need a corporate attorney, you need to go over here.

And that’s invaluable for these business owners because they finally feel like they have direction and they’re just not seemingly googling away to find answers that are not applicable because then they’re in the wrong jurisdiction, the wrong state. There’s an exception that they didn’t realize that applies that they’re relying too heavily on. So these are the items that we saw firsthand and it’s been a wonderful experience to try to help them along this journey.

Jackie Gardina:

Do you have a particular experience that stands out for you as, this is why I started this?

Fawaz Bham:

There are so many so stories in that small business clinic sessions that we did all the way from a truck owner that was told by a friend of a friend that every time you buy a new truck for your trucking business, you need to form a different company and you need to have series LLCs and you need to hire this really big law firm to come in and advise you on structuring nothing could have been further from the truth to get him off the ground on buying his first truck and thinking about, okay, oh, I can think about independent contractors. It was a foreign concept to him. And we also had a farmer that had bought some land close by because they were small business owners too and really was struggling trying to figure out how to build on that land, how to build barns, how to build and store equipment and to navigate the zoning process and set up an entity to actually hold title and same thing, we broke it down into really small easy steps where he could finally understand the bigger picture and he could make the calls on, you know what, that is risk I’m willing to live with.

Not a problem. No, I see it here now I need to go get some expert advice on future development needs. So I do need to hire a zoning lawyer to revamp some of the parcels that I might be able to sell out later on. So just incredible stories of so many hardworking folks in our community. It’s been great

Mitch Winick:

Wise. Let me ask a similar question. I suspect that some of the young law students or young lawyers who volunteer in this clinic might get an aha moment and say, wait a minute, I never thought about practicing this area of law and then it changed the direction of their careers. Have you had that experience as well?

Fawaz Bham:

We have. We’ve had some great students tag along with us, shadow us. We highly encourage that The idea is for them to get exposure so they’re comfortable seeing what lawyers do best, which is navigate issue spot send to counsel our clients to better outcomes. And we have seen several law students come through that said, I was thinking about IP law, I was thinking about bankruptcy law, but the fun is what I will say, the fun that they were having, engaging with real people, struggling with real problems and seeing that, wow, this is a need that’s still apparent in every community across the United States because the drive to create businesses is hopefully never going away. So there is an absolute need for great lawyers, great law students that turn into great lawyers to help plug this gap, whether it be on a pro bono basis, which we hope on several occasions, but also in a professional billing setting of once you gain trust with a client, they might come to you for advice of who would you recommend for this particular area of law that I’m struggling with or this aspect? And you might be a great referral source for your colleagues, for your law student neighbor sitting next to you. So it’s really opened a lot of eyes for so many law students that have come through our program.

Jackie Gardina:

I just want to focus on something specific that you did that I think is remarkable not just starting the clinic, but what happened during Covid. We talk about small businesses as being the backbone of the US economy and I think you’ve highlighted something that I’m not sure is evident to everyone when they walk into that small independently owned business, which is they have to work their way through a byzantine set of laws from wage and hour laws to environmental laws, maybe to zoning and permitting and all of that often without any resources to make that happen. So your clinic is essential as a starting place for many of those people, but Covid hits and it hits small businesses really hard and it also means that your clinic which was in person wasn’t going to be operational. So tell a story about how you responded to that bump in the road.

Fawaz Bham:

That’s an incredible story. We all survived through this joint experience of the pandemic and in 2020 when orders started coming down of shutting things down in person, we at the firm here in me especially felt for so many of the community partners we worked with and understanding that they have a mission that they want to carry out, that they know they’re effective in doing so in person being embedded with the community, building these relationships, but now they’re not going to be able to leverage that. They would need technology and a way out in order to access and complete their mission. And so I still vividly remember in March of 2020, I picked up the phone and called the Dallas Volunteer Attorney Program, DAP here in Dallas, which is the premier sponsor provider of legal services to low income and people in need in the Dallas community and it’s a joint program with the Dallas Bar Association and the Legal Aid of Northwest Texas.

It’s been around since 97 and a partner that we’ve loved to work with over the years and we started brainstorming, how do we revive your 14 clinics, so not only the small business clinic but all of your clinics in Dallas that you run on a weekly, monthly basis. And it became evident real quickly that they didn’t have the resources as most pro bono community driven organizations do not have a standing IT department that can scale up and respond in a quick manner. I took it upon myself. We got a team together here at the firm with engineers, staff, other associates that were interested in helping and really brainstormed, okay, how do we replicate the entire in-person clinic experience from start to finish, make it seamless, make it even more efficient, and make it organized that it can actually be scaled and within, I kid you not, within a couple of weeks we had the first iteration of the platform live and it was being tested.

Hunt Andrews Kirth, again sponsored the first several of them exclusively to make sure we could work out all the kinks and get the system up and running. Fast forward to today, we’ve held over 300 virtual clinics. We’ve held one virtual clinic session every week since April, 2020. We’ve processed over 20,000 applications. We opened up the servicing of the clinic to the rest of the Dallas Bar Association, which is about 11,000 members and we had 40 different law firms, legal organizations, in-house counsel groups raise their hands and say, we want to be a part of this, we want to be able to volunteer and devote time to this wonderful cause. So even as we sit here today coming out of the pandemic, the virtual clinic platform has been incredibly successful and really serving as a model for so many other communities to replicate because it solves so many pain points on delivering access to justice and leveling the playing field for so many and it’s been a wonderful thing to be part of and an incredible journey again with our amazing community partners.

Jackie Gardina:

Just so I can understand, because it’s an amazing origin story, did you guys create a unique platform for the clinics?

Fawaz Bham:

You’re a hundred percent right? It’s unique in that the entire system is unique. The components obviously are accessible, they’re open source, they can be put together, but coming up with the entire process from start to finish of what the application looks like, the disclaimers that need to be collected, the income verification thresholds that have to be met as part of an in-person clinic as well as the note taking and aggregating the data back to the host, community partner, all of that is the beauty of the platform because it’s really allowed our attorneys to feel confident that it’s a consistent program, that it is a reliable program. It doesn’t, knock on wood, hasn’t gone down. It’s sustained, it’s maintained, it works like clockwork every week there’s a session every Thursday, so as we speak right now, there’s a session going on. The attorneys that are volunteering are trained up, so they’re delivering consistent experiences to the clients, which is also important because clients will come back and they’ve confirmed for us the experience is identical, the consistencies there. So we’re building this unit of trust with the community to say this is exactly how it’s organized and this is how it will be organized. It’s been a wonderful platform to see grow over time

Jackie Gardina:

And for completely selfish reasons based on that, our campus hosts, the Ventura County Legal Aid Clinic, is the platform available for other communities to use with their clinics? And if so, I’ll contact you after the show to find out who I should contact.

Fawaz Bham:

Yes, the components of it are, that’s one of my favorite parts of, while I’m practicing law with my wonderful billable clients on the non-billable side, spending time with community partners to say, okay, here are the components that went into this DAP virtual clinic platform. You can absolutely access ’em. You can create your own, you can modify it to make it custom to what you want it to be. In short, yes, it is accessible and we’ve had great success with a variety of partners down in Houston that have tried it, that have liked it and then have adopted it for their own purposes.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie may be the first call, we’ll be the second call because we have 11 community clinics, but we’ve never really focused on business small businesses. That’s always the hardest thing to reach out and yet, and particularly in small agricultural communities that make up both the counties that Jackie School serves and ours as well. On that theme, let me ask you, if I’m a lawyer listening to this and I think, oh, that’s great, but Fawaz had a large law firm that was already inclined to support his efforts. It sounds overwhelming. Maybe the success is even more frightening that if I start this, what happens if it goes through the roof and now I’ve got all of these people and I’m a small firm or a solo, what would you say to those who have the heart and desire to do it, but they’re just afraid of the mechanics of launching something like this?

Fawaz Bham:

Very good question. Incrementalism is your friend is what I would say first and second. We would not have been able to do any of this if we didn’t devote time to understanding community partners that we’ve worked with for years and building those relationships and understanding what their needs are and how they are going to service their mission and how we can assist them in servicing that mission. For all the small business lawyers out there, for lawyers that want to get more involved that don’t know if they have the resources to, my message is sync up, connect with the larger community of lawyers even if they’re not at your firm and the community partners and the nonprofits that are working in your community right now, because they’ve got great systems in place, great relationships in place, they’re more than happy to connect the dots and get you in touch with other like-minded folks so it doesn’t have to feel like it’s on one person, on one group.

You can fundraise for resources, you can absolutely hit up for different sponsors. There’s plenty of desire out there to help. What’s lacking is people picking up the mantle and saying, I might not know everything and this is unchartered territory, but I’m going to take the first step and then the next step and the next step. And believe it or not, the path will kind of unveil itself to you. You might have some starts and stops, but that’s completely great to have as part of your journey and you’ll be surprised how many people want to come along with you and add in whichever way they can to the success of what you’re trying to build. What’s kept me going, because it is a lot of work, but the amazing partnership with so many people has been the best part of it. And then obviously the ultimate success of seeing your clients leaving with joy in their eyes as opposed to fear when they come in of not knowing what questions to ask. They’ve never sat down with a professional before. They come suited and booted sometimes ready with all documents in hand because they take this so seriously. Seeing the joy in their eyes when they leave the session is incredible and that’s what keeps me motivated and that’s the story I keep sharing with law students, young lawyers, senior lawyers, even of this is what everyone needs to be doing and if everyone did a little bit more, we would be so much better off in the United States.

Jackie Gardina:

That access to legal services gap would probably not close completely, but be narrowed quite a bit. And I think you raised it again, going back to the reason why we wanted to start talking about these things is that community engagement. So you’ve mentioned the Dallas Bar Association as a really important partner. Obviously your law firm has been central to the work that you’re doing as well. Who are some of the other community partners that you reached out to or reached out to you to be engaged in this work?

Fawaz Bham:

We’ve had several Texas C Bar, which is also an organization based in Austin Wings, BCL of Texas, LiftFund, which is another organization that is devoted to micro loans, lifting entrepreneurs off the ground and kind of giving them some of the business insights that they need. It’s one thing to get the legal insights, but then these businesses and rising entrepreneurs need other assistance as well. So there are so many of those organizations that are out there and we’re constantly getting introduced to new ones, finding some great ways to make some wonderful partnerships for the future.

Mitch Winick:

We’ve deemed this season three as optimism and action, and you certainly have expressed that in both why you did it, how you’ve done it, how you’ve engaged others. How has this changed your life and your practice?

Fawaz Bham:

It’s hard to look back and think what I would’ve done if I didn’t do this, because I think going in, as I’ve talked about, it’s always been part of my mantra that I knew I was going to work really hard for my billable clients doing 2000 hours of billable work, no question about it a year, but kind of holding myself to account to make sure I devoted as much time as I could to pro bono efforts year over year and hopefully with the aim of increasing it year over year. It really goes hand in hand because the energy I get from my non-billable work, let’s say, drives my billable passions to bring my best self to work. I’m the chair of the pro bono committee here in Dallas, and it’s a fantastic way to try to elevate other folks around the firm here in Dallas that have passion projects and we try to have them bring their authentic self.

If you’re passionate about something, let’s talk about how we can tackle it, how we can get in front of it, what we can do, what small things can we do, what larger things do we want to do, pie in the sky in the future. And that really has kept me engaged in big law, which is something that I often hear from law students going, I would love to go on a similar journey to you. I just don’t know if big law is the right fit for me and my to them is the energies you pour in is what you’re going to get back out. So if you have a passion for something that’s not billable, let’s say pursue it and have that part of your journey because that’s going to actually propel you to do your best work. It’s going to be a legacy item that you’re going to be able to look back on here. I’ve been practicing over 11 years that you can say, okay, I’ve done some incredible professional strides, but man, I changed a few lives in the process, and that’s what you really want at the end of the day.

Jackie Gardina:

Woz, that is just a perfect message to end on. And so I think you’ve met the goal of sending the next season of our podcast, optimism and Action off to a really good start. Thank you for coming and sharing your story with us.

Fawaz Bham:

Fantastic. I’m so glad,

Mitch Winick:

Fawaz, thanks for what you’re doing, both you personally and the work with the Dallas Volunteer Attorney Project, and congratulations on the recognition with the A BA Pro Bono of the Year Award, clearly well deserved.

Fawaz Bham:

Thank you so very much again for having me and for really shedding light on one of very many stories that I’m looking forward to hearing.

Jackie Gardina:

Mitch, we are recording this on January 30th, and it’s been a really difficult January here in Southern California. We are dealing with fires and then we were dealing with the fallout and uncertainty with the new administration coming in. And I wasn’t feeling hopeful when we started the podcast, but I am feeling so hopeful now, and he even reminded me that we have a ton of attorneys in California that are actually helping those who are impacted by the fire on a pro bono basis, and it’s that kind of community energy that I think is going to lift us during difficult or uncertain times. So FO’s story was great and I’m glad that we have a chance to share it.

Mitch Winick:

I agree with you a hundred percent, Jackie, on all of those points. And Fawaz helped us as lawyers be reminded that it isn’t some of the most obvious things that we are dealing with, the challenges with the fire insurance law, immigration law, criminal law. These things are very typical, but for the small business owner in the communities where we live, who have to figure out how to make this work every single day, the fact that we as lawyers can help them in a similar pro bono free way is a real call to action. And I hope that will be a call to action in other communities that hear this as well. Fawaz has said they could help you get your clinic set up, and maybe it could be a shortcut to get things going in your community. SideBar would not be possible without our producer, David Eakin, who composes and plays all of the music you hear on SideBar. Thank you also to Dina Dowsett who creates and coordinates sidebar’s. Social media marketing.

Jackie Gardina:

Colleges of law and Monterey College of Law are part of a larger organization called California Accredited Law Schools. All of our schools are dedicated to providing access and opportunity to legal education to marginalized communities.

Mitch Winick:

For more information about the California accredited Law schools, go to ca law schools.org. That’s ca law schools.org.