Megan Daily – Supporting our Community Small Businesses and Nonprofits
By Christine Lopez Kulumani

An associate at ArentFox Schiff LLP, Megan Daily’s practice concentrates on mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, entity formation and structuring, commercial contract drafting, and general corporate law. Her everyday clients tend to be large, sophisticated entities with the ability to afford expert legal counsel. The transactional experience advising these sizeable clients allows her to provide valuable pro bono support to DC’s newest, smallest nonprofits and small businesses who otherwise could not afford to pay hundreds of dollars an hour for legal help.

With the explicit purpose of helping others and positively impacting her community, Megan began volunteering with the D.C. Bar Pro Bono Center’s Nonprofit & Small Business Legal Assistance Programs in early 2020. Megan says she was drawn to these programs because of the direct accessibility the offer: “Beyond the financial benefit, there is no bureaucratic red tape that impedes clients’ direct access to the legal aid they desperately need.”

As the trainer for the What’s in a Contract and Why session of the respective nonprofit and small business legal training programs, Megan directly educates hundreds of owners, founders, and executives on contract law basics. Over the past three and a half years, she has also advised dozens of local organizations on contracts, starting a business, corporate law, and general legal aspects of operating a small business. In particular, she frequently assists new businesses created out of pandemic-related opportunity or need. The small business owners note the tangible, immediate effects of her expert, wholistic legal help:

Megan [was] kind and knowledgeable. [She] not only answered my questions but gave me important context helpful for my upcoming business decisions. I left our meeting
feeling informed and encouraged about the next steps for my business formation.

Megan took the time to carefully think through the edits she made prior to our meeting. She was [] thoughtful and effective. It really helped that she had recently assisted another similar company and was therefore well-versed in the “what-ifs” of this business.

Notably, Megan’s work to make legal assistance more accessible to small businesses and nonprofits in the DC area was recently recognized by her employer, which awarded her the inaugural ArentFox Schiff LLP Roger Pascal Pro Bono Award in 2023. Her committed pro bono practice supports the lifelong dream of many to found a nonprofit or open a small business. “The Pro Bono Center gives [small business owners] hope that their businesses can succeed,” Megan observes.

The Pro Bono Center’s Nonprofit & Small Business Legal Assistance Programs support existing and aspiring nonprofits and small businesses through brief legal advice clinics, trainings, and an online resource library, https://www.lawhelp.org/dc/npsb. Clinics and trainings are staffed by expert volunteers, such as Megan, who use their legal backgrounds to train and provide advice on entity formation, corporate law, contract matters, intellectual property, employment law, commercial leasing, government contracting, tax law, and more.

Attorneys interested in volunteering with the Nonprofit & Small Business Legal Assistance Programs should email NPSB@dcbar.org.