CSR reporting
‘Freshfields’ second CSR report demonstrates continued progress in the
firm’s commitment to retain its leading position in CSR reporting in its sector.’
– The Corporate Citizenship Company
Winner CSR Firm of the Year 2007 Legal Business Awards
Business in the Community Big Tick Award 2007 for our programme for homeless people
Certified CarbonNeutral® by The CarbonNeutral Company across all our offices
Winner Law Society of England and Wales’ Excellence in Social Responsibility Award 2007
Building on our 2004/5 corporate social responsibility (CSR) report – the first to be produced by a leading international law firm – we feel we are making progress but there is a long way to go. There is no room for complacency in terms of integrating our social and environmental commitments into the firm: this is an ongoing, and constantly evolving, journey.
Our 2006/7 report highlights several important achievements, especially in our approach to sustainability firm-wide; our continued response to the global issue of climate change; the development of our community and pro bono programme across our network of offices; the increasing involvement of our associates in shaping our firm; and our approach to diversity, which seems to be having a positive impact, with an increase in the number of black and minority ethnic people among our trainee solicitors in London. We believe all these elements are important to the future of our firm and the wider world we live and work in.
Overall, we have met many, but not all, of the targets we set in our first CSR report and initiated new activities we hadn’t even imagined in 2005, such as the firm-wide Community Challenge and our network of green teams.
But it hasn’t all been successes: there are still too few female partners and, as the London associates forum has pointed out, there are a number of key internal issues that we need to work on that will require longer term solutions. We look forward to reporting on these and other issues in our next CSR report.
We feel we have moved forward but there is still more to do. For example, we would like to ensure all our offices collect and provide consistent data for the next CSR report.
We will continue to use our CSR report to help us collect, analyse and communicate what we are doing. We will be updating our figures next autumn, following the end of the current financial year in April 2008. We will continue to update these pages when there are significant developments. Our next assured CSR report will be in 2009.
Our report for this financial year 2006/7 is international in scope, covering all our offices. It covers those issues we believe are material to the firm and our stakeholders. For future years, we will look to deepen our reporting.