Help has arrived for lawyers in Washington seeking to find ways to fulfill their pro bono goals and obligations. All that is required is a virtual trip to www.ProBono.net or www.advocateresourcecenter.org where lawyers and advocates can find pro bono organizations, volunteer opportunities and training information right from their desktops. Registering on the site provides access to various areas of the website and the option to receive selected email information and newsletters.

One of the newest tools on the sites is an online pro bono opportunities guide, available at this time only in Washington and New York. Washing-ton’s guide was launched in September as a project of the Seattle Area Pro Bono Coordinators, Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, Perkins Coie LLP, the Northwest Women’s Law Center and the Unemployment Law Project. Both guides give attorneys the ability to easily locate organizations offering pro bono opportunities tailored to their exact interests. Drop-down menus allow advocates to select geographical and practice areas.

Some of the Washington organizations listed include: King County Bar Association, King County Dependency CASA, Volunteer Advocates for Immigrant Justice, Eastside Legal Assistance Project, Washington Lawyers for the Arts, Kinship Care Solutions, Nonprofit Assistance Center’s Nonprofit Legal Clinic, Tacoma-Pierce County Bar Association, and Snohomish County Legal Services. The guide will be expanded to include additional organizations in King County and across the state.

Bringing together the previously haphazard and disorganized proliferation of individual legal services websites has been the project of ProBono.net, a nonprofit headquartered in New York, with a mission to use technology to increase access to justice. Northwest Justice Project works with ProBono.net providing content for Washington. Other participating organization are: Columbia Legal Services, Fremont Public Association, Legal Action Center, Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, Northwest Women’s Law Center, Seattle University School of Law, TeamChild, Unemployment Law Project, University of Washington School of Law, University Legal Assistance/Gonzaga School of Law, and Washington State Bar Association/ Access to Justice Board.

ProBono.net serves as the portal (and development site) for legal aid programs throughout the country that have been receiving aid from Legal Services Corporation to invest in technology. The grants from LSC’s Technology Initiative Grant have been used to develop statewide legal aid websites in 44 states. To date, LSC has devoted $13.8 million to helping its grantees develop and maintain websites that serve as a portal to legal assistance for clients and pro bono attorneys on a statewide basis.

The result has been the creation of dual websites in each participating state: one for the public and one for pro bono advocates. San Francisco, New York and District of Columbia were among the first regions to go on-line on the advocates side. Washington State, Georgia, Louisiana, and Montana are more recent additions.

Over the next year, legal services and pro bono groups in nearly 30 regions, including Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsyl-vania, South Carolina, Texas, U.S. Virgin Islands, Virginia and Wyoming, will be building areas on probono.net.

Log on and check it out!