Pro Bono: Legal Corps
For Minnesotans of color and others with very limited financial resources, starting a business can be particularly challenging. For the past 20 years, these entrepreneurs have benefited from a pro bono legal partner. Minneapolis-based LegalCorps helps them properly set up legal structures for their businesses, work that includes reviewing contracts and lease agreements.
LegalCorps executive director Nicole Deters describes the “equitable access to business law services for individuals and nonprofit organizations that promote economic justice and more stable communities.” In a sense, LegalCorps picks up where civil legal aid leaves off. Instead of working on issues such as housing, child welfare, and employment, LegalCorps focuses on transactional business and intellectual property work for small businesses, nonprofits, and individuals mostly from low-income backgrounds. It has a “significant focus” on “historically marginalized communities,” a term that includes ethnicity, race, and gender, Deters says.
LegalCorps delivers on its mission primarily through roughly 600 attorneys at firms throughout Minnesota who provide specialized transactional and intellectual property expertise. The agency also employs an in-house attorney who works specifically with recent immigrants to Minnesota and partner organizations that work with them.
One of the biggest obstacles fledgling BIPOC business owners face: filing and reviewing the necessary legal documents. The entrepreneurs served by St. Paul-based Latino Economic Development Center (LEDC) “cannot afford the legal services when starting their entrepreneurship endeavors,” notes LEDC interim executive director Enrique Blanco, whose nonprofit provides access to capital to Latino-owned businesses throughout the state.
“The impact of the services that LegalCorps provides to our clients is huge,” Blanco adds. If these services weren’t available, “a lot of our clients wouldn’t be successful.”
Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, LegalCorps is homing in on its goal of serving 2,000 clients annually. Much of the agency’s growth has happened in the past few years. “In 2020, we started to see twice the growth in demand for services,” Deters says. And from 2022 to 2023, LegalCorps experienced a 50% increase in clients served. Last year, the agency provided nearly $1.5 million in services through more than 4,000 hours of both in-house and pro bono attorney time.
Not surprisingly, the agency believes that the pandemic and the attendant layoffs initially drove much of that growth. “Wanting to take control of their financial stability and security,” Deters says, many turned to LegalCorps to set up their own businesses. The civil unrest also inspired many to start their own nonprofits and social justice organizations, and they tapped LegalCorps attorneys’ expertise on entity formation, writing bylaws, and other operational setup work.
Currently, LegalCorps provides about 70% of its services to metro-area clients, with the rest in Greater Minnesota and nearby states (where it provides patent services). Deters expects that the percentage of clients outside the metro will grow this year as LegalCorps pursues plans to provide more attorney office hours. With immigrant communities growing in Greater Minnesota, “we’ll be working really hard to promote a service delivery model that works statewide.”
