In 2008, Marcou and two other women founded the D.C. Volunteer Lawyers Project to provide free legal services to low-income people in family law cases. Why did you three start it? We were all mothers who had taken time off from the practice of law to raise our children. We started practicing pro bono, mainly taking adoption cases and working as guardian ad litems (which is taking the best interest of a child in a custody or neglect case). We all found it was really hard practicing pro bono law if you weren’t affiliated with a law firm, the main reason being because you don’t have malpractice insurance.

What happened? Four years later we have, I believe, over 450 lawyers on our listserv. We’ve taken hundreds of cases, I believe over 400 cases. Last year we did over 9,000 hours of pro bono volunteer hours.