Pro Bono Spotlight - Noah Maurer ʼ22

Why did you decide to volunteer with the SBLC?

I had good relationships with the staff of the clinic from my time working there as a law student. I really liked doing business transactional work in my career which overlaps well with the work the SBLC does. There’s always a demand for setting up business entities, writing operating agreements, or giving advice on specific matters. In my first year as a lawyer I helped three different SBLC clients.

As a younger attorney, I think it’s really important to do pro bono work, to proactively build up the habits of helping people which we must continue to do as we get older. It’s not hard to carve out 50–100 hours to help folks over the course of a year. I want to make that a common habit now and I think the SBLC relies on people who have that mindset, who want to give back and help the community.

What was the most positive surprise you had while working with the SBLC?

There was one client I helped who was putting together a musical. It was a really interesting initiative where he was, as a teacher, writing his own creative material and songs and having students perform. I got to go with Clinical Professor Susan Felstiner to see one of the early performances and some of the creative process. We helped him with a lot of the legal work leading up to the show itself, and it was great to get to see the fun stuff and the creative side that I was jumping through all of these hoops to make happen. It was really fun to see him on stage instead of just in a Zoom room.

What has been your biggest challenge?

I do a decent amount of pro bono work with some other groups around Oregon, and it’s tough because pro bono representation is, in my mind, this kind of segue between consultation and full-fledged representation of a client. Most pro bono work is going to be a type of limited representation because you’re working with limited resources and time compared to a full client who has retained you, where if they keep bringing you legal work you are going to keep doing it. In the pro bono setting you’ll be asked to produce, for example, two tangible items and you have to limit representation to that, so that when more people come in next month who need help you can ensure you have the time to work on their matters as well so that everyone gets their chance to benefit from the work you do.

But it’s really difficult because some people need more than just two things, or those two things change over time. That kind of space between full representation and consulting and trying to maximize the utility someone can get out of the work you do can be hard because there isn’t always a clear answer or hard limit that can be defined. I often think about how to best structure this sort of pro bono limited representation, and it’s a hard question. I think that SBLC has done a good job at managing it, but a lot of people in the pro bono space are always thinking about it and asking, “how can we approach this in an evolving way?”

What are your future goals?

I really like the work that I’m doing right now; working with people across the greater Portland area. I want to continue to prioritize working with those clients. I really enjoy merger and acquisitions and other corporate transactions work, and specializing in strange new transactional devices and new concepts that are always around the corner. There’s always new industries and new laws that change the current layout, and I like the specialized drafting that’s needed to tackle these issues, and I’m always very interested in looking forward to seeing what the next big thing is that I can get a jump on.

I’ve also been very interested in potentially registering as an agent in the NBA, to represent players and engage in contract negotiations and the like. A long-term goal of mine is to do that training course so that I can actually represent players like that, which I think would be really cool to do in private practice alongside my pro bono work.