2025 Report on the Law Firm Pro Bono Challenge Initiative
Published on 20 June 2025
Read PBI’s 2025 Report on the Law Firm Pro Bono Challenge® Initiative, which benchmarks pro bono performance by Law Firm Pro Bono Challenge signatories in 2024.
The 2025 Report on the Law Firm Pro Bono Challenge Initiative examines the pro bono performance of signatories to the Law Firm Pro Bono Challenge statement during the 2024 calendar year. Challenge signatories have committed to contribute 3 or 5% (or at a few firms, 60 or 100 hours per attorney) of their annual total client billable hours to pro bono activities as defined by the Challenge and report their performance to PBI Law Firm Pro Bono Project staff each year.
Key highlights include:
- This year, 114 firms reported performing an aggregated total of 4,925,000 hours of pro bono work in 2024. Pro bono hours represented approximately 3.71% of total client billable hours in 2024, a 1.33% decrease from 2023
- The percentage of attorneys engaged in pro bono in 2024 was slightly higher than the percentage engaged in 2023. The combined participation rate of all attorneys was 73.6% in 2024 as compared to 73.3% in 2023.The percentage of partners participating in pro bono was 62.9% as compared to 63.8% in 2023, and the percentage of associates participating in pro bono was 84.1% as compared to 84% in 2023.
- For 2024, firms reported performing nearly 3.4 million pro bono hours for those of limited means and organizations serving them. This comprises 73.4% of all pro bono hours reported for 2024, a slight decrease in percentage compared to 2023 (74%).
- In 2024, the total amount of charitable giving to legal services organizations decreased to $14,482,068 from $16,722,447 in 2023, although 5 fewer firms reported on giving this year. The average reported firm donation in 2024 was $425,943, which represents a 10.9% decrease from the average firm donation in 2023 ($477,784).
