Abstract
ABSTRACTAt its core, corporate social responsibility (CSR) concerns the impacts of businesses on their surroundings. Despite their significant economic and geographic presence (and, as a corollary, their potential significant impacts), and despite the varied disciplinary and conceptual lenses used to study CSR, there is very little existing work looking at law firms and their own CSR policies. This paper fills part of that gap. In August 2014, we reviewed the websites of the top 100 English law firms, as ranked by the trade publication The Lawyer. We were interested in public disclosures made by those law firms on CSR. These were widespread. The majority of the top 100 firms say something to the wider world about CSR. However, what is said varies significantly. This is, perhaps, unsurprising. What is more surprising is that so few firms explain why they are committed to CSR. Where firms do make disclosures on CSR, these tend to group around the following three areas: (i) pro bono and community giving; (ii) diversity and inclusion; and (iii) environmental matters. For a number of firms, little or no distinction is made between pro bono (i.e. the giving of free legal advice) and wider ‘community giving’. We question whether this is the right approach. We were also concerned that, despite there being regulatory intervention by the Legal Services Board as regards the collection and reporting of diversity data by law firms (and other lawyers), the quality of disclosures (in terms of the amount, nature and breadth of data reported on) varied to such an extent that we were unable to draw any meaningful comparisons or conclusions on diversity in English law firms.
Highlights
As a phenomenon and a field of scholarly enquiry, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been a site of significant interest for the last five decades.1 CSR is ubiquitous in the corporate sphere, and a Google search for the term brings back over 16 million results.2 At its core, CSR concerns the impacts of businesses on their surroundings
The lower ranking of the law firm, the less they say about CSR, there are some notable exceptions to the rule at both ends of the rankings
As part of our review of law firm websites in the summer of 2014, we were interested in whether and how firms reported on CSR: whether those firms had a CSR section to their website and, if so, what those sections contained; whether formal CSR reports had been produced by the firms; what the firms categorised as constituting CSR activity etc
Summary
There is no one definition of CSR. The European Commission suggests it should be understood as “the responsibility of enterprises for their impacts on society”.’14 In order for an “enterprise to fully meet their corporate social responsibility, enterprises should have in place a process to integrate social, environment, ethical, human rights and consumer concerns into their business operations and core strategy in close collaboration with their stakeholders.” despite this list, the constituent aspects of CSR elude a common, agreed definition. Legal integrity and the banking crisis' in J O'Brien and Iain Macneil (eds), The Future of Financial Regulation (Hart 2009) For an account of this history, see: Richard L Abel, The Legal Profession in England and Wales (Blackwell, 1988) Lisa Keller Glanakos, ‘Corporate Social Responsibility Programs in Law Firms’, Practice Innovations Newsletter (January 2011) https://info.legalsolutions.thomsonreuters.com/signup/newsletters/practiceinnovations/2011-jan/article4.aspx Sally Wheeler and Gary Wilson, ‘Corporate Law Firms and the Spirit of Community’ (1998) 49(3) Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 241 ibid, 254 For an overview, see: Hilary Sommerlad, Sonia Harris-Short, Steven Vaughan & Richard Young, The Futures of Legal Education and the Legal Profession (Hart, 2015) In a 2007 paper, Cameron and Taylor-Sands consider the impact of corporate social responsibility on the conduct of corporate litigants and propose “a long term approach that involves the courts, complemented by corporations as self-regulators developing internal codes of litigation conduct”: Camille Cameron & Michelle Taylor-Sands, ‘Corporate Governments as Model Litigants’ (2007) 10(2) Legal Ethics 154, 175 Kim Economides & Majella O'Leary, ‘The Moral of the Story: Toward an Understanding of Ethics in Organisations and Legal Practice’ (2007) 10(1) Legal Ethics 5, 19. These pieces suggest that the motivations of firms in undertaking CSR reflect the business case (partly demand side driven, via specific clauses in tender documents and law firm panel appointment processes), positive impacts on law recruitment and staff satisfaction, together with some suggestions that law firms adopting CSR policies can lead to increased productivity. In charting how law firms report their own CSR practices, we hope to provide an overview of current market practice, and to lay the foundations for further studies that engage with law firms directly in order to better understand what they do in terms of their CSR agenda, and why they adopt their chosen approach
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