A press release came my way today from McCarthy Tétrault, announcing that the firm is the first Canadian “Partner Without Borders” of the Quebec division of Avocats Sans Frontieres. [Edit] ASF is an international NGO devoted to providing legal assistance and representation to vulnerable individuals and groups in developing countries or those in crisis. The organization is active in 30 countries, working with local groups on a completely pro bono basis. ASF Quebec has a number of law firm sponsors already, but McCarthys is the first to become un partenaire. Good for them.

Any law firm worth its charter has always been active in its community, of course, but in this age of megafirms with global reach, we’re starting to see super-national firms display a truly remarkable degree of involvement in issues and organizations that transcend the usual local undertakings. Check out DLA Piper, whose New Perimeter project is an incredible piece of work: a worldwide pro bono initiative that has seen 13,000 lawyer hours contributed to, inter alia, drafting new judicial laws in Kosovo, restructuring a micro-lending project, developing a worldwide food bank system and creating a human rights center in southern Africa. This is work on the scale of the CBA’s sterling International Development Committee, but supported by a for-profit firm rather than a non-profit association.

It would be naive to overlook the obvious marketing and recruitment benefits of McCarthy’s move here: the press release highlights the firm’s other pro bono efforts, including its support of Pro Bono Students Canada. This obviously invests the firm with some cachet among law students and new lawyers, many of whom take overseas development work very seriously. McCarthys, of course, will have to back up this commitment with active participation in Avocats Sans Frontieres (and now I have Peter Gabriel’s Games Without Frontiers stuck in my head), because students can also tell real commitments from mere gestures. But I prefer to think McCarthys means what it says here about its pro bono commitment, and that what we’re seeing really is the white-hot trend of globalization applied to the age-old tradition of lawyers’ community service.