Community and pro bono legal advice

Topic Progress in 2007/2008 Targets & commitments 2009/2010
Community involvement and pro bono Community Challenge – our first firmwide community initiative – took place in 2007. This resulted in a firmwide increase in participation in our community and pro bono volunteering activities: from 24 per cent and 24,000 hours (in 2006/2007) to 29 per cent and over 30,000 hours in 2007/2008.

Our 2008 team challenge month involved nearly 700 people from 22 of our offices.

Most offices have developed new community and pro bono relationships, increasing our positive impact on local communities and beyond.

Rolled out our international pro bono campaign, designed to increase the amount of time contributed to providing free legal advice to individuals in need and to our community partners.

Launch of our matched funding initiative for charity fundraisers within the firm.

We also seek to encourage participation though our firmwide e-bulletins and are planning internal 'seeing is believing' visits for our partners, senior associates and heads of departments in London during 2009. 		Double pro bono hours firmwide by 2011.

In our 2006/7 report we set a target of increasing the level of participation in our community and pro bono programme across the firm to 30 per cent by 2008/2009.

Achieve a more consistent spread of involvement across our offices, practice groups and business services.
Management Continued to use the London Benchmarking Model to measure and report on our community giving. The London Benchmarking Group (LBG) is used by many businesses to assess and report on the value and achievements of their corporate community investment programmes. Measure the benefits to society, and wider impact of our programme, in a more systematic way.
Advocacy and engagement We are involved in Business in the Community's leadership groups on education, homelessness, and international volunteering. As a result in 2008:

  • we commissioned research and led a campaign to encourage more business people to fill the 40,000 vacancies in school governing bodies in the UK. The research was presented to the Department for Children, Schools and Families.
  • we researched and presented to various Members of the European Parliament and European Commission, CSR Europe and the European Alliance for CSR, our recommendations and toolkit to encourage and enable more businesses to support employee volunteering activities across the European Union. The aim of the work was to demonstrate how volunteering can improve the skills of disadvantaged people so they can gain and sustain employment. Several of our projects were showcased, including our job coaching scheme in Frankfurt; work placements for homeless people in London; Number Partners, which aims to improve maths skills among schoolchildren in the UK; and the discovery day for disadvantaged young people from Paris.
  • we supported and participated in research commissioned from the New Economics Foundation. The research investigated the financial and other barriers to employment for homeless people in the UK, to establish what financial incentives would be required to motivate people back to work and deliver an overall net gain to government.

In addition, our continuing support for Shelter enabled the charity to launch the Children's Legal Service unit in the UK, as part of our shared efforts to end child homelessness.

Our job coaching scheme in Germany has expanded to include our offices in Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt and Hamburg.

We also supported initiatives with the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills in the UK and the Ministry of Education in France.

In the UK we are working on a website to encourage more employers to encourage and enable their staff to be Number Partners – to improve maths skills around the country. 		Continue to be actively engaged in sharing best practice, and encouraging and enabling more employers to develop community programmes.