Colorado Expects Capacity Crowd For First Pro Bono Summit

By Zach Dupont ·  Listen to article

Law360 (July 17, 2025, 4:42 PM EDT) -- Colorado's first pro bono summit is set to take place in Denver on Friday, and organizer Kristin Bronson, executive director of the Colorado Lawyers Committee and member of the Colorado Access to Justice Commission, hopes the summit will help expand pro bono services and access to justice across the state.

Bronson told Law360 that the statewide summit, created in collaboration with the entire access to justice community, aims to bring together the legal community to create "actionable steps" to expand pro bono services.

"We want to increase pro bono work within the profession in Colorado, we want to build connections between pro bono leaders who serve and those who serve the communities that are in need," Bronson said.

Colorado has a long history of supporting pro bono work, Bronson said, but its issues include difficulty getting pro bono representation in some of the state's rural jurisdictions.

"We have some judicial districts where there are very few if any attorneys, much less ones that are able to contribute significant time to pro bono," Bronson said. "The legal need in those areas is really great. They do tend to sometimes be higher poverty areas and ones where we just don't have the services. ... Pro bono can help be a gap filer."

To address this, Bronson said people will be attending the summit, at the Colorado History Museum, from across the state including mountain towns, the western slope and Mesa County.

"I don't know that we've ever come together in a single location, in a single day, to try to find some solutions to the issue," Bronson said.

To facilitate this, the summit offered fundraising and scholarships to organizations in Colorado's rural areas to help them get there. The summit will have all-day roundtable discussions on topics including common challenges for pro bono workers and what is and isn't working in the space.

The event features two speakers: Colorado Supreme Court Justice William W. Hood III and U.S. District Judge S. Kato Crews.

"We have the state and federal bench represented bookending the summit, which I think, for me, really demonstrates the support that we have from our courts in trying to address some of these access to justice issues through pro bono service," Bronson said.

Bronson said she is expecting a capacity crowd of more than 200 people.

"I hope we have enough chairs for everyone," Bronson said. "When you look at the reaction that we've had statewide to the idea of the summit, I think it just goes to reinforce the incredible commitment of the Colorado legal community to doing pro bono for people that cannot otherwise access an attorney and need legal representation."

--Editing by Brian Baresch.