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It is my firm belief that it will take not only courts, governments, and non-profits but also a non-negotiable commitment of the private sector for us to truly make the strides our communi- ties deserve in their quest for greater access to legal services.
And as such it is my own promise to continue to dedicate my career to pushing the boundaries of the legal system to achieve our most ambitious goals.
Thank you again for bestowing upon us such a meaningful award.
SOPHIE TREMBLAY
We quickly found out that to materialize our pro bono vision, we would need to create not one, but two legal structures, as it was forbidden by the Quebec Bar at the time to operate a law firm as a non-profit organization, and as such we could not do pro bono legal work that way.
As a result, we created both a non-profit, our legal clinic, that would give legal workshops, provide legal information, receive and process legal requests for pro bono services, as well as a corporation, Novalex Law Firm, that acted as the legal department of the non-profit to open up files and take on the pro bono mandates.
At first, we received our pro bono cases through requests sent to us on our website. We es- tablished, along with the board of directors of our legal clinic, eligibility criteria based on governmental legal aid thresholds, increased by 40%. As mentioned by Ryan, we also helped small non-profit organizations and social entrepreneurs, and had eligibility criteria for those organizations as well.
We would answer every pro bono request, either by phone or email, verify the area of law of the request, the financial eligibility of the client, the absence of conflicts, and then assign the case to someone on the team, who would then represent the
client from A to Z, including court representation if needed.
Our firm had annual targets of pro bono work and commer- cial work to make sure that we would “break even” or make a small profit at the end of the year.
That is how we did a few hundred hours of pro bono work in year one when it was just Ryan and me, then more the fol- lowing year, as we were probably four-five people on the team then, then more again the following year, and so on, eventu- ally reaching an average of nearly 7,000 pro bono hours per year, for a team of some twenty lawyers.
Over time, we became victims of our success. In 2022 alone, we received over 300 pro bono requests, and could not accept them all, or dedicate the time to process so many requests.
So, starting in 2023, we shifted our approach and partnered with key field organizations to build specific pro bono projects with them. Our partner organizations now filter the requests and send them our way after this initial triage.
SUMMER 2024 JOURNAL 40
We began Novalex with the simple, perhaps naive, but rather bold idea of revolutionizing the private practice of law, with the goal of making top notch legal services accessible to all, regardless of clients’ financial means.