Filling the Justice Gap Award: Charlotte Legal Initiative to Mobilize Business
Minority-owned and women-owned small businesses in North Carolina often face daunting obstacles finding and affording competent legal counsel. To help fill this access-to-justice gap, Kimberly Zirkle of Moore & Van Allen and Kate Maynard of Robinson Bradshaw spearheaded the creation of the Charlotte Legal Initiative to Mobilize Businesses (CLIMB) in 2021 and McGuireWoods, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, and Bradley Arant Boult Cummings joined shortly afterward. Today, CLIMB has provided more than 900 hours of pro bono transactional legal services to low-income entrepreneurs and small businesses in the Charlotte area, with a focus on businesses whose ownership consists primarily of people of color, women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, veterans or disabled persons.
The need for these services is great. Of the nation’s 50 largest metro areas, Charlotte ranked last in economic mobility in a 2014 study led by a team from Harvard and the University of California-Berkeley. A new business can be a lifeline to upward mobility for women and minorities, but even those who wouldn’t usually qualify for pro bono services often struggle to afford even the most essential legal services for starting a business.
CLIMB’s leaders crafted an innovative design to ensure its services would reach communities with the greatest need. CLIMB accepts applications primarily through its relationships with a small number of referral partners who work with members of the communities CLIMB seeks to serve. It accepts clients with incomes up to 500% of the federal poverty level, whereas traditional pro bono providers often set their caps lower. This allows CLIMB to fill the gap and serve clients who can’t access traditional pro bono services.
Attorneys who volunteer for CLIMB – more than 100 from the participating firms — provide many of the same legal services they provide to large corporate clients, just on a smaller scale and to a community of entrepreneurs that would otherwise struggle to access counsel. To date, 98% of CLIMB’s clients have been people of color.
In its first year, CLIMB counseled a diverse group of more than 60 entrepreneurs on a range of legal questions typically facing small businesses, including business formation, corporate governance, tax implications, supplier and services contracts, and employee contracts.