New Zealand's Attorney-General Chris Finlayson is considering making pro bono work a requirement for law firms engaged in government contracts.

This move is in response to a call from the New Zealand Law Society president John Marshall, who had asked the government to consider pushing the country's big law firms to do more pro bono work.

Bell Gully's head of litigation Ralph Simpson told ALB that the proposal is part of a push to have New Zealand firms catch up to their Australian counterparts. In Victoria, for example, law firms must undertake pro bono work for an 'approved cause' of up to a value of 5 to 15% of the fee they earn under any government contract.

Simpson said there has been an ongoing government push to systemise the pro bono work of law firms. A significant reduction in government funding over the past year for New Zealand's neighbourhood law centres may have also triggered this latest move.

Simpson said that setting pro bono requirements will create a real incentive for law firms to systemise their pro bono systems. "Government work is prestigious and represents a stable income stream, especially for firms with a Wellington office," Simpson said. "No matter how much [government work] firms are doing, they want more."

Currently New Zealand law firms have much less formalised and well established pro bono systems than their Australian counterparts. "Pro bono work [in New Zealand] has historically been reasonably ad hoc," Simpson said. "The level of pro bono activity in a firm depended on the individual partners in the firm and their personal involvement with charities and welfare organisations."

Simpson told ALB that while he is happy pro bono work in law firms has now received government attention, the proposed model may not be the best approach. New Zealand's top law firms, by their own initiative, have long recognised the need to increase their pro bono commitment.

Simpson Grierson partner Greg Towers said that the move follows a greater global trend, primarily driven out of the US, of pro bono work being an inherent part of legal culture.

Chapman Tripp partner Catherine Somerville said clients are increasingly looking for points of differentiation between the different law firms. "They take into account brand, not just technical ability," Somerville said.

However, modelling New Zealand's pro bono requirements after Australia's system may set the bar too high. "Australia and especially its major cities suffer from bigger urban problems," Simpson said. "They have greater social need for pro bono work than here."

Simpson said New Zealand firms have to look quite hard for valuable pro bono activities. Somerville is worried that requiring lawyers to do pro bono work on a target basis rather than a value basis will affect the quality of service. "If it is not done out of passion for assisting the client but merely to fulfil a quota, there is a danger that pro bono clients may become second-class citizens," he said.

Perhaps for this reason, most of the top New Zealand law firms count pro bono work towards billable targets but have not established a quantifiable pro bono firm target or minimum requirement for lawyers. Bell Gully is one of the few firms with a formal pro bono target - each lawyer is required to do a minimum of 25 hours of pro bono work per annum.