Sometimes the spirit is willing—but the opportunities are bleak.
For most of her career, attorney Susan Link searched for ways to do pro bono work. She wanted to give back to the community, but the more she searched for the opportunity, the less likely it seemed that she’d ever be able to make that happen.
“I’ve been practicing law for 23 years,” says Link, partner at the Minneapolis firm of Maslon Edelman Borman & Brand. “For 21 of those years I did zero community service work and zero pro bono. The reason is my focus is wills and estate planning, and that kind of practice doesn’t usually lend itself to pro bono work. Nobody does estate work for free. But I got my law degree at Notre Dame, and there they teach you that lawyers should give back. I was itching to donate my time. I just didn’t think I’d have the forum.”
Then, in 2005, Link read about South Carolina attorney Anthony Hayes, co-founder of Wills for Heroes, a volunteer organization that connects volunteer attorneys with emergency responders like firefighters, EMTs and police officers to draft wills and estate planning documents.
“In the article I read, Hayes said that 90 percent of the responders to the Twin Towers disaster had no wills,” Link recalls. “It turns out that most emergency responders haven’t drafted a will. I thought, ‘I can write a will in my sleep. This is a place where I can help.’”
Link approached the Minnesota State Bar Association (MSBA) and offered to set up a Minnesota branch of Wills for Heroes. The MSBA supported her idea, establishing the group through its probate and trust section. Link was named the program’s director.
The Minnesota chapter of Wills for Heroes held its first event on June 25, 2007. Today, teams of volunteer lawyers travel around the state, meeting with emergency responders to draft basic wills and estate documents in one-hour meetings. Before each event, which is usually sponsored by the responders’ place of employment, participants fill out a detailed questionnaire. At the face-to-face meeting, attorneys—with the assistance of a volunteer data entry person—go through the questionnaire, drafting wills and other documents using an estate planning software program called HotDocs.
“We can get a person a basic set of documents within an hour,” Link says. “We cover the basic things a responder would need, like naming a guardian for minor kids, setting up a trust for minor children, naming a personal representative and naming a trustee.”
The group now holds an event twice a month across the state. “My goal,” Link says, “is that in the future, every Monday night there will be a Wills for Heroes event somewhere in the state.”
The project has become Link’s passion: Last year alone, she logged 460 volunteer hours with Wills for Heroes. And Link isn’t the project’s only volunteer. Many attorneys and paralegals have donated time to the group’s events. “We’ve assumed that drafting each of the estate plans would cost $1,500,” Link says. “As of now, the value of what we’ve given away is $2.6 million. That’s a lot of money, but it’s only a fraction of what they’ve given to us.”
For Link and her fellow volunteers, being able to give an emergency responder the knowledge that his or her family will be protected no matter what the future holds is well worth the time they’ve donated to the cause.
“Sometimes you’ll be sitting down with a police officer and he’ll be glaring at you with his arms crossed,” Link says. “It looks like he’s thinking, ‘What does this lawyer want from me?’ Then you start talking, and he opens up. By the end of the session we get hugs. Often, when a responder gets up to leave, the spouse will take me aside and say, ‘Thank you. I’ve been trying to get him to do this forever. It gives me such peace of mind.’”
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