The pro bono movement endures on the work advisors cannot bill

Scott Kahan was in San Diego for the Financial Planning Association's annual conference on Sept. 10, 2001, and woke the next morning to a television showing attacks unfolding thousands of miles away. "I was stuck in San Diego for a few days there because I couldn't get home," he told Wealth Management, recalling that his two children were young and that his firm, Financial Asset Management Corporation, kept offices in New York City and in Chappaqua, 35 miles north of Manhattan.

Kahan grew up in Yonkers, went to Syracuse, and started his practice in 1986, none of which mattered on the morning of the attacks. What he did over the years that followed did: he helped organize volunteer financial planning for victims' families, an effort built on estate work and compensation claims no fee schedule could hold, and that effort seeded a pro bono movement in the planning profession still running today.

In the weeks after the attacks, Congress created the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund to compensate victims and their families, on top of money organized by private groups and New York City. Families then had to find their way to a claim and make sense of requirements that were, in Kahan's telling, confusing — including how much a family should receive, while many of the people who died had no will, dropping estate planning in front of households that had never had reason to think about it.

Families were being charged for that help, and Kahan watched attorneys and others ask large fees to guide grieving people through the compensation requirements; finding it unethical, he chose not to argue the point but to organize around it, setting up pro bono work for victims' families through the FPA in New York and Washington, D.C., in partnership with Trial Lawyers Care, an attorneys' group formed to provide free services to the same population.

The work landed close to home: living in Chappaqua and commuting into the city, Kahan passed, every day, walls plastered with "Missing" posters of the people who had been lost, and he remembers sitting with a woman who had little financial background and was trying to work out what to do after her son died in the attacks. "It's unimaginable to some degree," he said, the quarter-century since doing nothing to soften it.

Strip away the anniversary and this is a story about what advisors can and cannot charge for, where the particulars matter. The help the 9/11 families needed was almost none of what an RIA sells; it was the reading of a government program, the assembly of an estate file for someone who died without a will, the arithmetic of a claim against a fund — the technical edge of the practice, and the edge is where the fee schedule thins out. The value was real and the invoice was not, and Kahan's decision to do the work for free was a recognition that competence with no market attached is still competence worth deploying.

The design of the effort is the part worth copying: Kahan did not run a clinic alone but organized through a professional association that could convene a bench of planners, pairing that bench with a legal group that had already built the path to the families. An advisor working solo would not have found those families, and could not have answered the estate questions without a lawyer alongside, so the early machinery of the movement was a division of labor between two professions that for the most part meet only when the will is already drafted and the money is already moving.

The industry overpays scale and underprices durability, and the 9/11 effort is the cleanest evidence for it in the profession's recent memory: nothing about the arrangement was scalable in the sense a growth-minded firm means the word, because it was volunteer hours, convened by a membership body, aimed at a population that would never become clients. It survived anyway — the movement is 25 years old — a more useful fact than any keynote on purpose. The reasons are unglamorous and instructive: the work was technically hard, the families had been identified by a partner the planners trusted, and the fee was zero from the first day, so there was never a margin to protect and therefore never a reason to walk away.

There is also a hiring argument here that firms routinely rediscover and then forget: advisors who enter the business to help people with money spend most of their hours on process and product, while the 9/11 work was a rare case where the actual skill — reading a financial life and telling someone the truth about it — was the entire job. That is the memory a firm competes with when it tries to explain to a young planner why the compliance calendar and the client database matter, and the pro bono programs that hold such a planner tend to look less like marketing and more like the 2001 arrangement: a body that supplies the volunteers, a partner that supplies the need, and a problem small enough to finish.

Kahan is still president of Financial Asset Management Corporation, and the movement he helped start is now 25 years old; what it still lacks is a business model, and that lack is instruction for whoever answers the next version of the call. Get the association and the legal partner in place first, so the planners arrive while the families are still working out what they are owed, and not after the fee-takers have found them.