Pro bono legal services quite a mouthful in Germany

Lord make me pure but not yet!

Augustine of Hippo

beiten-burkhardt.com

goerg.de

oppenhoff.eu

pro-bono-deutschland.org

RE. Your honorable services in the domain of pro bono

Gentlemen, ladies

By chance I came across the website “Pro Bono Deutschland e.V.” and read with enthusiasm that its members are "committed to the principles of social justice, democracy and the rule of law and to the recognition of human rights in particular." Furthermore "strive to set an example and motivate other lawyers and law firms which have not yet become involved in pro bono work." That is quite a mouthful.

It is certainly good news and moreover euphonious that finally some eminent law firms in Germany purvey 'pro bono' services in the esteemed field of the law, IOW you.

Unfortunately, according to my personal and just recently empirically established experience, you seem to see this honorable endeavor as a sort of window dressing exercise, perhaps even resembling a Baudrillardian simulacrum.

While I can certainly understand in times when ordo and neoliberal environments govern much of the professional world, that an enquiry from a recipient of the unorthodox realm of governmental social support services, christened after a savoir vivant with the then delectable preference of Viagra-induced sexcapades on company costs, offers none of the flashiness, prestige and cachet a pro bono service for a charity or any other enterprise operating on other people's money affords, a simple canned email response would have done the trick of plain and professional courtesy. You sure must have such a thingy. Di niente.

Then again, the legal pursuit of free speech is quite often among lawyers in Germany met with ambiguity and the not so subtle deliberations in blog posts of where it ends and should it not be rather curtailed.

Be that as it may, what was intended to be an enquiry mutated to an impromptu empirical exercise and it would be daft to withhold the result of this study. So without further ado here it is: out of a total of four contacts, one contact responded, while three chose to abstain (1). IOW, a 25% response rate of admittedly weak statistical significance. I would venture though to guess that a larger survey sample would not have resulted in Simpson's paradox.

I am sure the Adhikari of the home of poets and thinkers will over time join the other countries that proffer these fine, and may I add, karmically beneficial acts, of Kantian provenance since years.

In this spirit, cheerio,

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(1) the one who responded is not mentioned above