THE National Pro Bono Resource Centre is to ask all Australian lawyers to sign up to perform between 30 and 35 hours of free work a year - about 45 minutes a week.

The centre is chaired by Peter Stapleton, who was awarded the NSW Law and Justice Foundation's Justice Medal last night.

A former partner of the corporate law firm Blake Dawson Waldron, he was honoured for his own pro bono work and his long relationship with the Aboriginal Legal Service.

He believes suburban and country solicitors - the GPs of the law - have always done pro bono work, as have individual city lawyers, and there has long been a belief in the profession that lawyers should help when they can.

However, only since the mid-1990s have large firms started to adopt structured programs to help those he calls "the neediest of the needy".

The new target will be offered to all firms and lawyers, and will be voluntary. Those who sign up will not be named and shamed if they do not meet it.

The centre conducted a survey of 225 Queensland lawyers this year. It found that 80 per cent had done some free work in the past year, and 86 per cent believed lawyers should do pro bono work.

Howe ver, there can be problems fitting free work into a for-profit firm's schedule.

The survey reported one respondent as saying doing pro bono work was "OK as long as it doesn't get done within [a supervising partner's] billings budget".