Strengthening links with clients and communities

Allen & Overy’s pro bono and community affairs programme – Values into Community Action – covers a variety of projects and initiatives undertaken by lawyers and staff across its international offices. These are chosen to reflect the firm’s core values and its commitment to access to justice and education. Litigation associate Davina Watson has been seconded to undertake a review of the firm’s approach to corporate responsibility (CR), reflecting its strong commitment to its CR programme. This case study outlines:

1. The main benefits that the firm and all its stakeholders derive from its pro bono and community activities;
2. Allen & Overy’s approach to CR.

Benefits to the firm
The ongoing community projects outlined in the following paragraphs demonstrate that, in addition to providing local communities with free legal advice and practical support, the firm derives significant business benefits from its CR activities. These include:

Strengthening the firm’s connections with local businesses and communities;
Building closer connections with clients;
Attracting clients and high performers;
Strengthening the firm’s internal community by providing team-building and cross-selling opportunities.

Supporting the local community
Allen & Overy’s flagship London office in Bishops Square is on the edge of Tower Hamlets, one of UK’s poorest locations. Most of the London office’s community projects are focused on this area. Ongoing projects include a well-established education programme, which supports local schools through reading and mentoring schemes. “We have run about 20 projects for children in Tower Hamlets,” says Chandran. “Many of the children whose education we support are from families where English is a second or even third language, so they don’t have anyone at home who can support their development in English. A reading partner can advance a child’s reading by up to a year.” The firm has recently formed a partnership with the Spitalfields City Farm, helping to deliver lessons on literacy and numeracy in a more interactive way. About 150 volunteers are involved in the firm’s education scheme, which has been running for over seven years. In addition to this hands-on work, Allen & Overy supports local schools with core funding, library resources and strategic advice.

Developing closer connections with clients

Collaborating on community initiatives
Other projects involve working in partnership with other big businesses in Tower Hamlets to address specific issues facing the local community. A recently established initiative is directed at combating rising debt. “Failure to deal with debt is often the trigger for a range of problems, including homelessness and mental illness,” explains Chandran. “It damages families and it can affect children’s attainment – which in turn affects their ability to access higher education and ultimately employment. It is self perpetuating.” In partnership with ABN AMRO, a long-standing corporate client, the firm is setting up a debt advice clinic for local residents through Toynbee Hall, a local charity. Advice sessions are provided by volunteers from both organisations who are given training and support to deliver practical advice on financial literacy to the local community.
According to Chandran, client contact based on shared values rather than only business objectives strengthens the connections between lawyers and their corporate clients. “Community work is an effective way to build long-term working relationships,” she says. “Working in partnership with clients in this way provides opportunities beyond the workplace for teams and individuals to bond. This can only add value to corporate relationships.”
Watson adds that this type of collaborative working, which combines the legal and financial expertise of the two firms, offers an opportunity to maximise the expertise offered to the local residents.

Sharing CR expertise
Allen & Overy’s CR experience and expertise is acknowledged by its clients, some of whom are approaching Chandran and her team for advice. “Although many corporates have excellent CR programmes, these do not always engage the skills of their in-house counsel teams. We advise clients on setting up their own pro bono schemes,” she explains. “This adds another dimension to the service that we can offer our clients and helps to differentiate us from other law firms. As they look to their lawyers for advice on their business activities, they also look to us for guidance in the pro bono world.”

Reinforcing values and reputation
Allen & Overy is careful to select pro bono and community activities that reinforce the firm’s core values. This attracts and retains clients, high performers and the best graduates. “Our pro bono and community affairs programme translates our stated values into action,” says Chandran. “This shows our clients, associates and employees that the firm delivers on its promises.”

Fostering a strong internal community
Pro bono and community work represents an additional informal networking and team-building opportunity as it brings together people working at different levels in different parts of the firm. This internal community transcends role and function. “For example, partners, secretaries and business support professionals regularly cook breakfasts and wash dishes together at the Whitechapel Mission,” says Chandran. “This type of work is a real unifier. It creates a strong sense of community within the firm, bringing together people who otherwise might never meet and providing a completely different forum for them to get to know each other.”
Chandran observes that community involvement has become part of the firm’s culture. This is largely due to the leadership of senior management, the commitment of staff and the long-term nature of many of the projects. “As we have developed strong, long-term relationships with some organisations, they have become part of the business,” she explains. “We take the same approach to our community clients as we do to our corporate clients: we find out what they want to achieve and work out how we can help them achieve it. We care greatly about them so we go the extra mile to make sure that their needs are met. It is also immensely satisfying for people to see the impact of their work on vulnerable groups.” In addition to long-term projects, each year employees are invited to nominate a charity partner for the firm to support, so the employee population has input into the theme and direction of the firm’s community programme.

Recruitment and retention
In her evaluation of the firm’s CR strategy, Watson has found that CR is a significant factor in recruiting top-quality graduates and lateral hires. “High performers can choose between several big City law firms, so this is something that adds value to what Allen & Overy has to offer,” she says. “The results of our annual pro bono and community affairs survey informs us that the opportunity to undertake pro bono and community service contributes to the sense of engagement for our staff: our employees appreciate that the firm is prepared to invest in responding to their aspirations and their desire to put something back into the community.”

Benefits to individuals
The business case summarised above is underpinned by the benefits that involvement in CR activities bring to lawyers and non-lawyers throughout the firm in terms of:

Personal and professional development;
Networking and career opportunities;
Providing opportunities to put something back into the community.

Personal and professional development
Both pro bono and community work help to develop and promote the skills and knowledge of lawyers and non-lawyers. Although Allen & Overy has a comprehensive training programme, it specialises in corporate and financial work. Chandran and Watson agree that pro bono work helps junior lawyers develop their problem-solving skills by giving them direct client exposure. “A trainee or junior associate working on one part of a very big deal might have limited face-to-face client contact, but volunteering to help somebody with their gas bill or a credit agreement often enables you to achieve results in a matter of days or weeks, which is very rewarding,” explains Watson.
Working in the legal advice centre gives Allen & Overy’s lawyers experience of another side of their profession. “There’s nothing glamorous about the law centre, but it’s the best side of the profession, because it delivers what it was originally intended to do – to protect and empower people who can’t protect themselves,” says Chandran.

Defining an overall strategy
Acknowledging the value of its CR activities to the firm and those working within it has moved CR up the business agenda. For the past year, Watson has been on internal secondment. Her role is to examine what CR means to the firm with the purpose of developing a strategic approach to CR and consolidating existing policies into a unified strategy.

CR as a differentiator
Although the firm has undertaken pro bono and community work for a long time, there has been a shift in clients’ attitude to CR. It is starting to be a factor in clients’ decision-making. “Some clients seek evidence of our diversity, environmental and/or procurement policies,” explains Watson. “This led us to adopt a more integrated approach to CR.” She adds that CR may start to influence clients’ choice of law firm. “At the competitive high-value end of the market, how do they choose between us and other firms? In addition to experience and excellent legal advice they look for a firm that matches their values and their culture. CR is a good way of demonstrating the firm’s culture to clients and to the outside world – it shows them what we do and what we stand for,” she says.

What does CR mean to the firm?
As the first step in devising a firm-wide CR strategy, Watson conducted a staff survey within Allen & Overy’s global offices to identify what they expect the firm to deliver in terms of CR. “We asked people what they thought CR should mean to the firm, what in practical terms they expect from A&O, where they thought we were doing well and where they thought we could do more,” she explains. This was followed by one-to-one interviews with key clients to discover what Allen & Overy could learn from the corporate world and what in particular clients expect to see from their legal advisers. “The majority of our corporate and banking clients have already implemented a comprehensive CR strategy. Having been through the process, they were happy to share their knowledge and help us learn from their experience. I asked our clients what they do, what motivates them, what works in practice and what they expect from us.” She then consulted various practice areas and business support functions to find out what they were doing in terms of CR. “Although we do a lot that falls under the heading of CR already, we don’t necessarily define it as CR and it was important to take stock of what is going on around the firm to establish a clear picture of our existing CR activities.”
“We also needed to identify our responsibilities, why we have them and who we owe them to. In addition to our professional, contractual and legal responsibilities that we have to comply with, we are also self-regulating in that we have stated values and policies which often set higher standards than the legal minimum. Identifying our responsibilities at the outset was important to focus our approach, rather than relying merely on the moral/ethical case for CR.”
All of the above contributed to establishing the firm’s approach to CR, enabling us to respond to the expectations of our staff and clients.

Identifying key drivers
Allen & Overy’s approach to CR is therefore driven by the commitment of its people – reflected in the high participation rates in its CR activities. Watson also acknowledges the importance of identifying and acknowledging the business drivers that underpin its strategic approach – the key ones are set out below:

Business development and client relationships;
Recruitment – graduates, in particular, ask us about our corporate responsibility programme;
Staff motivation and retention – pro bono and community work gives people a sense of pride in the firm and what they do. Watson explains that 76 per cent of lawyers in the UK were involved in pro bono activities in 2006, and the overwhelming majority of people in the firm undertake some form of community activity;
Risk management – “If we monitor our activities and our performance, we can identify areas where we can decrease business risk,” says Watson;
Reputation management – CR provides an additional opportunity for Allen & Overy to differentiate itself from the competition by its values;
Performance management – “Establishing a structured CR programme and monitoring and measuring our activities will enable us to improve our performance over time,” says Watson;
Transparency – CR performance is an important part of Allen & Overy’s non-financial performance. Communicating its performance in this area to the firm’s stakeholders will build upon the culture of transparency that Allen & Overy established when it first published its LLP accounts in 2005.

Part of the culture
“CR is part of the way we run our business, so it is considered everyone’s responsibility,” says Watson. It was therefore appropriate to conduct the CR evaluation in-house and this led to Watson’s secondment. “As we know our business best, we decided to think about what CR means to us, ensuring our approach is relevant to the culture of our firm and the aspirations of our people, rather than simply signing up to one of the many reporting standards/indexes,” she explains.

A structured approach
In response to the findings of Watson’s research, and in particular the results from the CR staff survey, Allen & Overy has established the following CR strategy for the next 12 months:

To take a structured approach to CR and report upon its strategy, performance and global targets in the following core areas:
Community;
Environment and health and safety;
Marketplace;
Our people;
Build upon existing strengths and initiatives;
Highlight where A&O can make a distinctive contribution in the area of access to justice.

As an LLP, Allen & Overy has published annual financial accounts since 2005. This year’s report will include a section dedicated to CR. “The purpose of including CR is to demonstrate to all stakeholders that it is part of our values and the culture of the firm,” says Watson. “Including CR in the annual report has also helped generate internal momentum for gathering and reporting upon our CR performance.”

Measuring CR data
Although the vast majority of people at Allen & Overy participate in pro bono and community work, the challenge was to define an overarching policy that covered all of the firm’s activities and initiatives. “This is a challenge because CR means different things in different countries and cultures,” explains Watson. “Although our largest office is in London, more than 50 percent of our people work outside the UK. Therefore, our strategy needs to be sufficiently flexible to allow individual offices to apply it in a meaningful way and make it relevant to them.”
Identifying performance indicators, to demonstrate Allen & Overy’s global performance, is an exercise that has required a lot of internal collaboration. The aim for the first year of reporting is to report on a few key areas, building on this over time. However, Watson acknowledges the need to avoid measurement for its own sake. “Where it is meaningful to report on data and set targets we will do so; however, we want to provide data that is meaningful for the business and important to our stakeholders, rather than generate lots of data to ‘tick the CR box’.”
“We recognise that it is important to measure, to enable us to assess our performance, but we need to balance this with the overriding aim of our strategy, which is for economic, social and environmental impacts to factor in all decision-making, in all areas of the business, and for all staff to be aware of the need to balance these interests,” she says.

Partner involvement
One of the reasons why Allen & Overy has such a strong tradition of pro bono work and community service is the level of partner engagement in these areas. Senior partner Guy Beringer takes a strong personal interest in the firm’s work in this field and leads from the front. Colin Pearson, a corporate partner, champions the firm’s London programme and Frankfurt-based Stephen Denyer, regional managing partner for Europe, is leading the charge internationally.

Next steps
Having acknowledged the clear business case for CR in terms of the firm’s reputation with clients and in local communities, Chandran and her team are building on existing programmes and rolling out best practice across Allen & Overy’s international community. In addition to monthly newsletters and a dedicated section of the intranet covering all the firm’s CR activities, a new strategy has been launched with the aim of recognising achievement in this area, sharing the expertise of high-performing offices firm-wide and encouraging individual lawyers to commit to more pro bono work. Initiatives include crediting 25 pro bono hours as billable time and granting lawyers up to five days off per year to work on pro bono activities. In addition, all staff are given a day off to work for the charity of the year chosen by each office.
Chandran emphasises that although the business case is an important consideration, it is more important not to lose sight of the underlying reason for undertaking pro bono and community work. “Ultimately people do this because they think it’s the right thing to do and we are unified by our shared desire to help vulnerable people who need this support,” she says. ?

Shankari Chandran is pro bono and community affairs manager at Allen & Overy. She can be contacted at shankari.chandran@allenovery.com. Davina Watson, litigation associate, can be contacted at davina.watson@allenovery.com

This article can be found in Ark Group’s 2007 Corporate Social Responsibility report. For more information or to purchase a copy of the report contact Adam Scrimshire at ascrimshire@ark-group.com.