(Reuters) - Voters aren't the only group poised to break turnout records this year.

A "record-shattering" number of lawyers volunteered to help defend people's rights to cast a ballot in Tuesday's presidential election, said Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the National Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

The national, nonpartisan Election Protection coalition has 42,000 trained legal volunteers this year, a giant increase from the 4,000 volunteers who turned out for 2016, Clarke said Tuesday. The coalition's English language toll-free hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE, is managed by the Lawyers' Committee and is sponsored by dozens of other organizations.

"The growth is responsive to the overwhelming challenges that voters face this season," Clarke said.

Those challenges include an ongoing coronavirus pandemic that is raging in many parts of the country, forcing polling places to enact social distancing measures and leading to an unprecedented wave of early voting.

The pandemic has also forced lawyers volunteering with the coalition to change how they operate on Election Day. Instead of sitting in a conference room with other lawyers from his firm, Proskauer Rose partner William Silverman is taking voter phone calls from his basement.

Proskauer is among the firms fielding more volunteers than ever for election protection efforts. In 2016, the firm contributed 100 volunteers; this time around, it has 400 lawyers, paralegals, alumni, and "corporate, in-house clients" volunteering, Silverman said.

Silverman estimated the firm clocked more than 2,000 hours of pro bono time between Monday and Tuesday.

"This is our single biggest pro bono project in the history of the firm," he said. His team is handling calls from voters in Ohio and Arkansas.

Those calls touch on a wide range of voter issues. For example, Silverman said his team helped an 86-year-old woman vote for the first time in her life after she didn't receive her absentee ballot.

"The volume of calls is many times more than it ever was in the past," he said.

The same goes for volunteers working with the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights. In 2016, it handled around 1,000 calls for assistance, but by early afternoon Tuesday, volunteers had taken 955 calls from voters in Illinois and Indiana, a spokeswoman said.

When needed, voter calls are escalated and referred to a team of lawyers who can travel in-person to polling sites or courthouses. Reed Smith counsel Jeffrey Wilhelm spoke to Reuters while sitting outside the Allegheny Court of Common Pleas in Pittsburgh, where he was monitoring courtroom activity.

Both Wilhelm and Alora Thomas, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's Voting Rights Project, said as of Tuesday afternoon, they have not had to file any voter protection-related lawsuits.

"There was a lot of litigation in the run-up," Thomas said. "But today, no cases have been filed ... Right now, I think we're waiting to see what it looks like as we near the closing of polls."