Activities in the US

‘Our people have demonstrated a great capacıty to apprecıate the ımportance of these ıssues to the fırm and the greater communıty. Our bıggest challenge ıs to always vıew our socıal and envıronmental responsıbılıtıes as core matters deservıng of our utmost attentıon and not perıpheral ones that we address only when convenıent or when we otherwıse are not occupıed by bıllable matters.’
Melissa Raciti-Knapp, partner responsible for CSR in the US

Our US offices are particularly active in terms of our pro bono legal advice programme. Our New York office has one of the highest levels of volunteering in the firm, with 46 per cent of people involved.

New York

We teamed up with Legal Outreach, a community organisation working with exceptional students from underserved communities throughout New York City, providing them with supplemental education and training to prepare them for college.

During the summer, the students intern at different law firms each week. Our office hosted four interns, who spent the week working on a mock acquisitions case with our corporate practice group, conducting due diligence interviews with our associates in New York, Paris, London, Munich and Tokyo. They then analysed their findings and presented their recommendation to a ‘board of directors’ played by six of our New York partners. The initiative involved 35 per cent of people in our New York office and looks set to become a regular fixture.

A team in New York represents the Street Vendor Project, a non-profit group working to promote the rights and well-being of the largely poor and immigrant vendors of New York City, in an action challenging the maximum fines of $1,000 set by the City of New York for vending infractions. We are currently appealing a trial court ruling before the Appellate Division.

We successfully represented the mother of a 15-year-old girl who is unable to read and write due to serious learning disabilities in efforts to ensure she received an appropriate education.

People in our New York office work with children at P.S. 72, a school in East Harlem, to help them improve their reading skills. Volunteers visit the school each week, and at the end of the school year the students make a trip to the New York office to get a feel for an office environment and meet with staff.

Every year, our New York office participates in New York Cares. Last year, volunteers spent a day helping clean up public parks, playgrounds and schools.

At Christmas, our US offices organise ‘coat drives’ for homeless people and participate in team challenges to package food and gift parcels for families in need.

Washington

Our Washington DC office represents the Global Campaign for Microbicides, a public health organization whose primary purpose is to co-ordinate worldwide efforts to develop and distribute microbicides that prevent sexual transmission of HIV. We represent the Global Campaign in its efforts to keep fake microbicides off the market. Fraudulent anti-HIV claims are dangerous because they induce sex partners to forego more reliable prophylactics, creating a greater risk of sexual transmission of HIV. The Washington office has helped the Global Campaign successfully remove several fake microbicides from the marketplace and continues to pursue several others. Our strategy combines communicating and co-ordinating with law enforcement, tax and regulatory agencies to put the marketers of fake microbicides out of business. We have also involved lawyers in our London and China offices.

Also on the pro bono front, lawyers in Washington have assisted in filing Supreme Court briefs in the Krishna Maharaj case.

The Washington office participated in the Salvation Army’s Angel Tree programme, which allows companies to adopt needy families and provide Christmas gifts for them. There was an office collection for the program and enough money was raised to buy gifts for a number of low-income families.

The office was also able to donate $8,000 to the Continental Airlines Scholarship Fund, which enables disadvantaged students to continue their post-secondary education.

Community Challenge

As part of our first firm-wide community and pro bono initiative, volunteers from our New York office took the fifth grade class of a public school to the Museum of Natural History to participate in a scavenger hunt, planetarium show and lunch. Volunteers also decorated cookies in the office and delivered these to the Bowery Mission, a homeless shelter, for their evening meal service.

In their first Community Challenge, staff from the Washington office spent the day assisting the 7th Street Garden staff with gardening tasks. The organisation aims to unite diverse communities by providing locally grown food, and our staff helped with cleaning gardens, planting seeds, mulching, painting vegetable boxes and watering plants.