Rachel Epps Spears has some great stories, but she isn’t at liberty to tell them, thanks to strict confidentiality agreements. As executive director of Pro Bono Partnership of Atlanta, Spears’s organization helps Georgia-based nonprofits with all manner of legal issues, from contract negotiations and leases to trademarks and copyrights. It has opened her eyes to the many hurdles nonprofits face, and opened nonprofits to the advantages of legal help they otherwise couldn’t afford. In 2014 alone, Spears’s organization provided gratis legal services totaling $3.5 million. And it’s not just nonprofits that benefit. “What’s surprising to me is how much our volunteer lawyers appreciate it,” Spears says of the more than 600 transactional attorneys who donated their time last year. “They constantly thank us for helping them volunteer and use their skills.”
While Spears, forty-four, grew up in a family that celebrated giving back to those in need, she didn’t earn her law degree with a nonprofit practice in mind. Instead, she began her career in 1997 as an associate in King & Spalding’s public finance department. During that time, she volunteered at Atlanta’s Gateway Center, a facility to serve the homeless, and she realized she could use her skills as a transactional lawyer to impact the nonprofit landscape in Georgia. In 2005, she became the Partnership’s founding executive director. “Looking back on my career, I can see how I ended up here,” says the mother of two. “I always sort of thought that serving would be separate from being a lawyer, but I feel really lucky that it’s now part of what I do professionally.”
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