Biography
Steven H. Schulman leads Akin Gump’s pro bono practice. He maintains a substantive practice in many areas of public interest law, including human rights, immigration, assistance to military personnel and poverty law matters. He has handled dozens of asylum and other immigration cases, with a particular emphasis on complex matters, such as those involving the application of terrorism-related grounds of inadmissibility.
He joined the firm in 2006 as its first full-time pro bono partner, and he has seen participation in the pro bono practice increase substantially in every office and across every practice group. The firm’s lawyers now devote an average of more than 100 hours annually to pro bono client matters.
Under his leadership, the firm has built strong relationships with local and national legal services organizations and has developed experience in several areas of pro bono practice, such as representing charter schools, working with refugees and victims of human rights abuses, and providing legal counsel to military personnel and their families.
He leads and supervises the firm’s Pro Bono Scholars Program. Started in Washington in 2008, this two-summer program, now in Dallas, Los Angeles, Washington, New York and Houston, identifies and develops top law students to become the next generation of Akin Gump lawyers committed to building the firm’s pro bono practice. The firm recently expanded the Pro Bono Scholars Program to London.
Before joining the firm, he led the pro bono practice at another large international firm as its first pro bono counsel. He developed and implemented that firm’s signature Child Refugee Project, assisting unaccompanied alien children in the United States through individual representation, legislative advocacy and systemic reform. As a result of this project, thousands of children were moved from detention to foster care.
Mr. Schulman served two terms as president of the Association of Pro Bono Counsel. He is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, where he teaches seminars on law firm economics and pro bono practice. He has also taught at Stanford Law School and The George Washington University Law School.
He frequently lectures on the role of pro bono in the legal profession, both in the United States and the United Kingdom.