By Daniel Wiessner and Joseph Ax

Oct 15(Reuters) - New York state's new rule requiring law students to complete 50 hours of pro bono work before being admitted to the bar is unlikely to deliver 500,000 new hours of legal services for the poor envisioned by its creators, law school officials across the state said.

Since Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman first announced the requirement in May, he has said that it would add roughly half a million hours of pro bono service each year, or about 50 hours apiece for each of the roughly 10,000 people who apply to the state bar.

It is difficult to gauge the level of pro bono hours New York law students already perform, since the work is not tracked by any organization. But based on estimates from the schools, it is in the tens of thousands of hours, a level that will certainly rise with the new mandate.

The challenge in meeting the 500,000-hour goal stems from objections that were voiced when Lippman first announced his proposal in May. At the time, the scope of what would count as pro bono work was unclear and school administrators worried the mandate would force them to expand their programs at a time of budget constraints.

To win over administrators -- whose buy-in was crucial -- Lippman opted to define pro bono broadly so it would cover existing programs such as clerkships, government internships and other initiatives that do not necessarily benefit low-income people. In doing so, however, he reduced the impact of the requirement on what he has dubbed the "justice gap," or the lack of civil legal services for the poor, school officials said.

"Will it increase the number by 500,000? Probably not, though I think we will see an increase in hours," said Larry Cunningham, an associate dean at St. John's University School of Law in Queens, New York. "The real benefit is that it communicates a message to students early on about the importance of pro bono and of gaining experience while you're in law school."

When asked about the 500,000-hour goal, a spokesman for Lippman said it was not a firm figure but an "estimate to describe the magnitude of the approach." Lippman himself called the final rule a compromise, but said that many students would go beyond the 50-hour threshold and that the "great majority" of the work would benefit underserved people.

"We had a choice to say that only the most narrow definition of service to the poor would count, and we felt that left out a whole area of public service," Lippman said. "And we didn't want to make it so difficult" for schools, students and legal service providers to implement.

Under the final version of the rule, many school programs and even summer jobs that provide stipends or salaries qualify as pro bono, so that some schools will have to do little or nothing to comply.

Of the 192 students who graduated from Cornell Law School this year, all but 14 would have qualified under the pro bono requirement, said Stewart Schwab, the school's dean. Most of them completed "public interest fellowships" or summer associate programs at law firms, he said.

During the 2011-12 year at SUNY Buffalo Law School, 135 of 449 eligible students completed clinics, a spokeswoman said. Another 142 students logged more than 15,000 hours collectively in externships and judicial clerkships, she said, for a total of at least 35,000 hours.

Similarly, CUNY Queens Law School, which currently has about 430 students, requires graduates to complete at least one clinic, which can involve up to 500 hours of work. Touro and Columbia Law School, which have about 1,800 students between them, make graduation conditional on the performance of 40 hours of pro bono work.

In the weeks since the details of the plan were made public, law school officials have praised Lippman and the 15-member panel that helped craft the requirement f o r responding to their concerns. They emphasized that the impact of the rule will ultimately be measured by the way it alters the culture of law education to include a greater emphasis on public service.

"If you look at the culture of the bar 10 or 20 years down the road, I think you'll see a significant shift," said Matthew Diller, the dean of Cardozo Law School in Manhattan. But "pro bono work by law students is not by itself going to solve the underlying problem of access to counsel."

Some schools have already tweaked their programs to meet the new requirement, which goes into effect on Jan. 1 and applies to anyone accepted to the state bar after Jan. 1, 2015. Hofstra has shifted faculty around and created two new positions, while Albany Law School has hired a fellow to help students fulfill the requirement. New York Law School has launched a new program, the Pro Bono Initiative, designed to expand pro bono opportunities and bring the programs under a single umbrella.

Officials at several other schools said they may soon consider tapping more people to run clinics, which are often staffed by adjunct professors. Most schools also are looking to form partnerships with law firms, legal service providers, non-profit groups and government agencies to expand pro bono opportunities for students.

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