Stanford Law School’s newest class is already breaking records. The John and Terry Levin Center for Public Service and Public Interest Law announced this month that 89 percent of the Class of 2014 has made a commitment to participate in one of the center’s pro bono projects before graduation—the highest participation number ever recorded. And the year is still just getting under way. The center organizes more than 20 pro bono projects each year, with opportunities to work with attorneys in areas such as housing at a clinic held nearby to emergency immigration status advisory projects held farther afield, such as one organized in Florida for Haitians displaced by the hurricane in 2010.

“The best way to characterize the Pro Bono Program is through the words of the students themselves,” says Betsy de la Vega, director of Stanford Law’s Pro Bono and Externship Programs. She offers this example: “Classes taught me the law I need to know. Pro bono service showed me the lawyer I need to be.”

While students learn critical skills by participating in these volunteer projects, the work they do has the added benefit of actually providing legal services. And in the end, de la Vega hopes, they will “come to see how important it is, both for themselves and the community, to make public service an integral part of their careers as lawyers.” She says she is determined to enlist the remaining 11 percent of the Class of 2014 by the end of the year.