Twenty years on the other side of the board table

It is the reason the nonprofit work on this site does not read like a practice-area brochure. When we describe what a board actually worries about in year five, or why a conflict-of-interest policy nobody has read since incorporation is a live problem rather than a filing-cabinet problem, that is not research. It is the seat.

It also set the firm’s view of what nonprofits are owed by their lawyers. An organization operating on a budget its board can recite from memory cannot pay for a lawyer’s curiosity. It needs answers priced so that asking is not itself a decision — which is the same principle the rest of the practice is built on, arrived at from the nonprofit side first.

Families who set up a foundation discover quickly that forming it was the easy part. Running it — grant agreements, the compliance calendar, minutes that will survive being read by someone in ten years — is the work that follows, and it is not legal work.

Our founding partner founded Meridian Philanthropic to do that work for grantmakers. The seam between the two is kept deliberately clean: the legal engagement ends at counsel, and administration is a separate relationship you are free not to enter.

Since 2016 he has been board president of a self-managed Florida cooperative of 89 residences. Self-managed means there is no management company between the board and the roof, the budget, the reserves, and the neighbour who is unhappy about the parking.

It is the least glamorous line in this firm’s history and one of the most useful. Governance stops being an abstraction the first time you have to run a meeting where the people affected by the decision are sitting in the room.

We take pro bono matters in the areas we already practise: formation and governance for small organizations, and first-contract and rights questions for artists at the stage where counsel is unaffordable and most consequential.

The limits are real and we would rather say them here than in a decline letter. Capacity is finite, and a firm this size that promised otherwise would be making a promise on someone else’s behalf. Every pro bono matter runs the same conflict check as a paying one, and a conflict ends the conversation regardless of the merits. We do not appear in court, so a matter that becomes contested has to move to counsel who does.

What a pro bono client gets is the part we can control: the same attorney, the same one-business-day reply, and the same written scope. The bill is what changes, not the standard.

It does not claim a total. No dollars granted, no hours donated, no count of organizations helped. Those numbers are easy to produce and almost impossible for a reader to check.

What is above is checkable. The foundation has a name and a public filing history. The cooperative has a board and 89 residences. The chairmanship has a start date, and it is twenty years ago.