Environmental Sustainability
Our work with some of the world’s most cutting-edge companies gives us first-hand insight into the innovative approaches that create a new blueprint for sustainable living, so where possible we apply this to our own firm too.
Environmental, social, and economic sustainability are core strategic initiatives for us – they are vital to our people, our clients, and our planet. We’re embracing the change needed to transform our business; not just minimising our environmental impact but making a positive contribution to a more sustainable future.
Our international Sustainability Committee is responsible for achieving our sustainability commitments, alongside our Sustainability Manager who is dedicated to furthering our global environmental agenda.
Find out more on our environmental sustainability commitments below.
In January 2022 we made a global commitment to the Science Based Targets Initiative, to set near and long-term targets to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in line with what science says is necessary to limit global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.
We’re establishing our global baseline for greenhouse gas emissions and developing a net zero action plans to reduce and achieve our goals. This global commitment builds on existing efforts to make our operations more efficient across our global network.
We’re committed to making operational improvements on an ongoing basis to achieve net zero and to reduce our environmental impacts.
We’ve outlined our firmwide goals in our Global Sustainability Policy, which includes commitments on procuring more green energy, reducing our waste generation, and reducing unnecessary travel, amongst others.
We have an Environmental Management System in place which allows us to measure our environmental performance, set goals and make necessary interventions in relation to key areas.
We know that good ideas come from engaged people, so we invite everyone at the firm to share ideas, know-how and experience in pursuit of our goals and have employee-run Environment Committees across our global network working to engage colleagues with sustainability issues. Working together as one firm, it’s all the little actions that add up to a big change.
A recent initiative which allowed us to plant 1,000 trees through ‘One Tree Planted’ was a challenge event run through our Green Challenges app, built in-house, where our people collectively logged over 1,000 actions they’d taken to be more sustainable at work.
We’re proud to engage actively to drive change in the legal industry through memberships of initiatives and networks.
We are a member of the Legal Sustainability Alliance, a network of firms working together to transition the legal sector to net zero and are championing sustainability across business functions. We are members of The Chancery Lane Project, a collaborative initiative to develop and embed net zero-aligned contractual clauses into commercial agreements. We are also signatories to the Sustainable Recruitment Alliance, a commitment our HR team have untaken to ensure a sustainable approach to early talent recruitment.
Organisations are undergoing a fundamental shift towards a more sustainable way of operating. We are partnering with our clients to offer guidance and support to help them meet their ESG goals. Our work in this space centres around three pillars:
- Regulatory compliance
- Becoming a good corporate citizen
- Create innovative sources of business value
