Lawyers, it's true, are on occasion mocked or derided for being self-serving, sneaky and untrustworthy. But the next time you feel tempted to crack a lawyer joke, be aware that Maine has some of the most caring legal professionals in the country - and that's official.

The state of Maine was recently recognized by the International Senior Lawyers Project for having the highest number of lawyers per capita of any state who participate in overseas pro bono work in developing countries.

One of them is Ellen Leitzer of Portland, who is currently packing her bags for a three-week trip to Southeast Asia to fight for sexual equality. "I am going to be working with a human rights organization in Cambodia that is filing a report countering the official Cambodian report to the U.N.," she says.

The Cambodian government report, says Leitzer, is meant to reassure the United Nations that it's making progress in extending equal rights to women in the country.

The official version, though, is often markedly different from the situation on the ground as seen by Non-Governmental Organizations and volunteers like Leitzer.

In the case of Cambodia, she says, women face a whole host of problems that the government is not doing enough to address, "Trafficking of women for the sex trade--that's a big issue--disparity in employment, disparity in education, disparity in healthcare, a high rate of maternal mortality while giving birth."

According to the latest figures, she adds, nearly one in 25 Cambodian women dies in childbirth. Leitzer recently spent two years in Nepal doing volunteer legal work and has an extensive background in the non-profit sector, running her own non-profit for 22 years offering legal services to the elderly.

Her experience, she says, will add a crucial element to the work being done by the charity workers on the ground, most of whom are local. "So in essence I'm going to help the local organizations to make sure the report is well written. And it's very hard for people whose English is not their first language, and U.N. reports have to be filed in English," she says.

For Dick Spencer (above)--a partner with Portland-based law firm Drummond Woodsum--his experience overseas was quite different. "It was actually one of the most exciting and fascinating experiences I've ever had," he says.

In 2006, Spencer spent four months in Mongolia, trying to mitigate the disastrous environmental effects caused by a booming, but an out-of-control, mining industry.

The country was facing the problem of thousands of nomads who were crowding into the cities and living in urban slums. "And the reason they were moving into the cities was that a lot of the rivers in Mongolia were being polluted and actually dried up as a result of unregulated mining, and so their water supplies for their animals were disappearing," Spencer says.

Spencer's background in public policy and environment persuaded a Mongolian Human Rights Group called the Center for Human Rights and Development that he was the ideal man for the job.

"This group decided that destruction of Mongolia's environment was actually the most important human rights issue facing the country, but they had no background for how to create environmental protections," he says. "So I went over there having worked on environmental issues in Maine for years."

Spencer helped draft two amendments to Mongolian mining laws, designed to help local communities in areas where there are mines.

He also helped win a landmark court case--the first victory against a mining company in Mongolia to be won by a non-profit. It involved defending a group of local residents who had voted against granting a mining license in their area. They were over-ruled by regional adminstrators.

"So it was kind of like a New England town meeting voting not grant a permit, not to approve something, and then having the selectmen go ahead and do it," Spencer says. "So based on an old Maine case of town meeting law, my group argued that the administartors shouldn't have been allowed to approve the license and the court agreed."

"We've been extremely impressed with the enthusiasm of Maine lawyers, their particpation in our program and the work they've done," says Jean Berman, executive director of the International Senior Lawyers Project, a non-profit that, according to its Web site, "provides volunteer attorneys to advance democracy and the rule of law, protect human rights and promote equitable economic development worldwide."

In the last few years, she says, nine Maine lawyers have been on prolonged ISLP-backed assignments overseas, all of which are unpaid, volunteer projects. "What we do is build the capacity of local lawyers, work on specific issues and problems with them, hopefully strengthen the work that they are doing, their capacity to promote the rule of law and justice in their own societies," Berman says.

Volunteer work done by Maine-based attorneys recently also includes protecting poor farmers in Kenya whose land was being taken by eminent domain for a mining company, and helping a Peruvian conservation group develop a system to trade carbon assets on the international market--with the bulk of the proceeds going directly to help indigenous groups.