Metro Volunteer Lawyers & Pro Bono: It Will Make You Feel Good About the World.
An Interview with MVL Chair Marty Champagne.
BY STEPHEN COOKE, ANTHONY PEREIRA, & JEREMY RAMP
Martin “Marty” Champagne, Jr. practices commercial and business litigation in Denver. Originally from New Hampshire, Champagne moved to Florida, where he graduated with honors from the University of Florida College of Law, before relocating to Colorado 10 years ago. He’s been named a Colorado Super Lawyer for 2024 and 2025; is the past chair of the Modern Law Practice Committee; and is a 2022 graduate of the Colorado Bar Leadership Training program (COBALT). Champagne is currently the Chair of the Metro Volunteer Lawyers Advisory Board and has served on the Board for the past seven years. He lives in Denver with his German Shepard/Belgian Malinois mix, Sebastian.
Metro Volunteer Lawyers (MVL) is the Denver Bar Association’s flagship pro bono program co-sponsored by the Adams/Broomfield, Arapahoe, Denver, Douglas/Elbert, and First Judicial District Bar Associations. MVL’s mission is “to bridge the gap in access to justice by coordinating the provision of pro bono legal services by volunteer lawyers within the Denver Metro Area to people who could not otherwise afford legal services for their civil legal issues.”
What is MVL?
Metro Volunteer Lawyers originated in the 1960s as the Thursday Night Bar with a group of lawyers who would get together and do pro bono work. MVL has grown over the years, and we currently offer pro bono services in eight counties in the Denver metro area. We help clients that can’t afford lawyers. We also provide multiple clinics every week throughout to help clients handle their family law case on their own, or assist them with preparing their wills, estates, and other civil legal matters.
Why is pro bono work important?
I think it’s important because legal services are out of reach for a lot of people. When you have to pay your rent or your mortgage, put food on the table, buy your kids’ clothes and things for school, legal services are just not in the budget for those with limited means. I think what we may not fully appreciate is what happens to those people that find themselves in the legal world. It’s a different language, and it’s like if you or I were dropped into the middle of China and we had to figure our way around it. That’s where a lot of people find themselves in the legal world. So, volunteering to take a pro bono case, it gives people a voice.
One of the things that we don’t appreciate is how scared a lot of these people are. You know, I’ve been doing pro bono work ever since I’ve been a lawyer, and a lot of these problems that come to us are relatively simple. But of course, it’s not simple to the pro bono clients we serve because they don’t have any experience in this legal world. When everyone is represented in a legal system, the system works better, not only for the litigants, it works for the judges and it works for lawyers as well. Everything moves smoother.
Will you explain your personal connection to pro bono work?
Growing up in New Hampshire, I had a difficult childhood. My parents divorced when I was 9 years old. My dad, who I am close with today, had issues that he had to work through. So, my mother raised us. There were times she would have 3 jobs to support me and my two younger sisters. As the oldest, I was left to make dinner a lot of nights if my mother was working. I became a proficient maker of pancakes because all you need to make them was Bisquick and water. We were on food stamps and government assistance for periods of time. I went to a public school where many of the students didn’t have my background. It was striking to me the difference between how they lived and where I came from. I remember, on more than one occasion, when members from the Lion’s Club brought Christmas presents and food to us. The door opened and there was a long line of these people we didn’t know just bringing us what we didn’t have. My mother held my sister and cried, and my sister asked, “why are you crying, mom?” One of the Lion’s Club members bringing in a present looked at me and smiled.
My life was changed by the kindness and generosity of strangers. I am sure that those members of the Lion’s Club that brought us Christmas presents and food when we were in need don’t even remember that moment from more than 40-years ago. But for me, it’s a moment that’s frozen in time – an indelible impression in my mind that I will never forget. It was like someone was there to say, “it will be ok”. I think pro bono work gives me the opportunity to try to pay that forward. To help someone in a difficult situation and say to them, “it will be ok”. People find themselves in situations they never imagined. We are there not to judge or criticize but to help lead the way out. We don’t know their background or what it’s like to spend a day in their shoes, but we can be there to help them. Pro bono service is tremendously important. We never will know the impact we have and if, 40 years down the road, someone remembers the service we helped provide in their moment of need and that we made a difference in their life.
What has it been like giving MVL clients that voice?
My day-to-day practice is business and commercial litigation. Mostly, I’m working with business owners, corporations, shareholders, and those types of clients. I like the challenge and the intellectual part of what I do. With pro bono work, however, I feel I can make meaningful connections and change in someone’s life. There’s a direct connection to the change and help we provide. It’s meaningful and lasting. You will never find people that are more appreciative than pro bono clients. You bring a light to them. We think to ourselves this issue is no big deal, but this is something that keeps our pro bono clients up at night and really worries them when they’re just struggling to get by. So, I’ve had enormous personal satisfaction from pro bono work over the years. It makes me feel good about myself and good about the world.
Since your practice area is not one that MVL handles regularly, does it limit your ability to volunteer?
It doesn’t limit it at all. I have taken over some cases that are out of the norm for pro bono cases. MVL accepts more than just family law cases. I had a real estate case, a breach of contract case, a case with a property dispute regarding heirs to a family home. I haven’t been limited. We have clinics where they have scripts and mentoring and support for areas, I don’t practice in. I’ve been to the wills clinic where we have software that’s set up and it’s a lot of just interviewing people. We’ve been putting on CLEs so that people can learn to dip a toe into a new practice area, where you can take a CLE and with that knowledge from that CLE, you can volunteer for a clinic. And one of the great things about these clinics is it’s an hour or two of your time. Not a big commitment. It’s just easy to do.
What are the benefits of volunteering for new attorneys?
New attorneys can get great experience for a practice area they’re interested in. Volunteering with MVL provides an opportunity for a lot of client interaction. It gives new lawyers confidence because these are usually pretty straightforward cases. We have a mentoring program where people can work with more experienced lawyers. And it’s a great networking opportunity too. I think you can meet a lot of other lawyers, a lot of other volunteers that are like-minded people.
What are the benefits of volunteering for experienced attorneys?
It’s interesting. I was at the Wills Clinic recently. We have a volunteer who hasn’t practiced in 20 years, and she keeps up her bar license just so she can come in and volunteer for the Wills Clinic for MVL. She gets something out of that, and it’s important to her. And so, I think for older attorneys, if you’re not practicing anymore, it’s a way to sort of keep your mind going and to continue to connect. You also have the ability to mentor a case with a young lawyer. I always think to myself, you know, all this knowledge we have in our head—it’s got to go somewhere, right? And so, you can help a young lawyer. I think it’s a tremendous benefit to older, more experienced lawyers as well.
What are MVL’s greatest needs?
We’re always looking for people to take cases. We’re always looking for people to volunteer at clinics. We’re always looking for people to donate money and attend our fundraising events. The more people that we can get involved and to understand what MVL does for the community—not just for the legal community, but for the community at large—the better. What kind of community do you want to live in? Do you want to live in a community where your access to justice and your access to lawyers and the courts is limited just because of the money you have? We provide that for everybody.
Do you have a creed, motto, or life philosophy you live by?
I think as I’ve gotten older that I’ve come to understand grace. Grace when I see somebody on the street asking for money, to understand that I don’t know their circumstances. I don’t know what landed them where they are, and to give them some grace. Or to give an opposing counsel some grace when I don’t particularly agree with their behavior or what they’re saying, but that I don’t know what’s going on in their life. And it’s to give grace to the people that we serve through Metro Volunteer Lawyers, not judging how they ended up into a particular situation, but understanding that we don’t know how, we don’t know what’s going on in their life and how they ended up there, but we’re there to help. So, I guess, my mantra, my motto, is grace, and that’s something I came to later in life that I didn’t understand until more recent years. But I just think we would all be better off if we could, as a society, our politics, if we could extend a modicum of grace to the other people that we’re dealing with every day.
What do you want the legal community to know about MVL?
I want the legal community to know the tremendous service that we provide to the community, that the people who are working at MVL, our volunteers and the staff, about their tireless commitment to the mission of MVL, and that they really believe it, and they get up every day and they really care. This is an incredibly empathetic and caring group of people, and they’re not doing it for glory or recognition or anything like that. And about the change that we seek to make and the improvements that we seek to make in the community are incremental, one step at a time.
You know, it’s not some big change overnight, but it’s somebody volunteering at a clinic to help somebody file for their own dissolution of marriage or to collect their child support. Or it’s an elderly person that lives in subsidized housing in Denver that’s concerned about where their belongings go when they die. You know that that’s incredibly meaningful to them, and that every day the staff of MVL, the volunteers of MVL, are out there, sort of changing the world. It’s not something you read about in the front page of The Denver Post. But I mean, it’s incredibly impactful and meaningful what we’re doing on a day-to-day basis, and how we’re changing people’s lives and preventing people from going down the spiral because they don’t have any sort of legal assistance to help them. So, I think you might not see it every day. You might not understand what we’re doing on a day-to-day basis, but MVL and the staff and the volunteers are making an incredible impact every day in the courts, every day in our clinics and making people’s lives just sort of a little bit better. I think that’s incredibly important and meaningful. And I have never been to a clinic or interacted with a pro bono client where I didn’t leave feeling good about it.
Bonus Question – What is your dog’s name?
Sebastian. He demands 100% of my attention and gets jealous when that’s not happening.