High recognition for pro bono service

Acknowledging his “extraordinary pro bono service over the preceding year,” the state bar is presenting its President’s Pro Bono Service Award in the Law Student category to third-year student Michael Perrone, a longtime intern with the Erie County Bar Association’s Volunteer Lawyers Project (VLP). The award is to be presented at a luncheon ceremony May 1—Law Day—at the bar association’s headquarters in Albany.

The association presents these awards, “to officially recognize and thank these exemplary attorneys and to convey a message to the profession, and the public, about the importance of pro bono efforts in achieving equal access to justice.”

It’s that commitment to access to justice, a unifying theme of a UB Law education, that has moved Perrone to take four internships with VLP, a nonprofit that provides legal services to clients at no cost to them. He has been placed in the organization’s Batavia office, which counsels immigrant clients facing federal deportation proceedings.

“This award caught me out of the blue,” Perrone says. “If it were up to me, the bar association would have recognized VLP as an organization rather than me individually. VLP is replete with dedicated individuals, including not only lawyers but also paralegals, social workers and administrators, who care deeply about what they do.”

Many clients seeking VLP’s help are detained at the Batavia Federal Detention Facility, run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They are typically being processed for deportation. “We do our best to ensure such proceedings occur fairly, with due process and with justice,” Perrone says.

His work has involved everything from intake interviews, to drafting memoranda and briefs, to advocating for clients in immigration court as a law student representative. “US law provides for several reliefs from removal,” he says. “That can mean a lot of things, anything from keeping a family together to saving someone’s life. There are life-and-death cases in the context of immigration law.” He speaks fluent Spanish, which comes into play often.

For all those who do this work, the animating principle is a shared commitment to a level playing field for those facing life-changing adjudications. Perrone notes that civil litigants aren’t guaranteed a publicly funded lawyer the way criminal defendants are, so pro bono work addresses a tremendous need.

“The more organizations like VLP that are providing free legal services to clients, the further we can go in balancing the scale,” he says. “We don’t get to pick and choose who gets justice and who doesn’t; we don’t get to say who is a human being and who is not.

“Justice and due process should not come with a price tag. The process due should not come down to the dues you can afford to pay.”

As well, he says, it’s a privilege to be in a position to hear people’s life narratives. “There are all sorts of stories,” he says. “The situations that arise are not as easy to generalize as what you might think from the news.”

Perrone, a former U.S. Army officer who holds an undergraduate degree in economics from University College London and a master’s degree in psychology from McNeese State University, says Lisa Patterson, the law school’s director of externships and access to justice initiatives, first suggested the VLP’s Batavia office to him. And he credits a long line of UB Law professors—Matthew Dimick, Rebecca French, Makau Mutua, Heather Abraham, Farina Barth, Luis Chiesa, Paul Linden-Retek, Tara Melish, David Coombs—with both developing his legal skills and reinforcing his commitment to serving justice. “These folks are all incredible people,” he says, “the law school is, first and foremost, everybody who works here and gets us where we need to be.”