International law firm DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary has introduced
measures to co-ordinate its in-house CSR activities across continental
Europe.
The global partnership, which has offices in most European countries,
wants to establish a general framework for its community involvement
that is applicable both in developed economies and in emerging ones
such as Bosnia-Herzogovina and Ukraine.
Elaine Radford, DLA Piper’s UK-based head of CSR, recently convened in
Vienna a one-day meeting of a dozen senior partners from various
countries to discuss the policy.
‘The idea was to look at a CSR strategy for continental Europe and how
we should go about identifying opportunities and evaluating what we
do,’ Radford told EP. ‘We don’t want to be terribly prescriptive, and
we want to have a framework that takes account of local values and
impacts, but we also want to develop something that is cohesive across
the continent and can give people in each country an idea of what they
can do.’
Although Radford said much of DLA Piper’s ‘better practice’ on CSR
stems from the UK, she emphasized there was no question of imposing UK
models on others. However, most of the firm’s CSR work centres on pro
bono work and volunteering – and this will continue.
The firm has linked up with the four-year-old Engage in Europe project,
which aims to increase the quality and extent of employee engagement
among participating businesses.
Three other international law firms – Allen & Overy, Freshfields
Bruckhaus Deringer and Linklaters – are also part of the project run by
the International Business Leaders’ Forum and Business in the
Community.
DLA Piper is not the first organization to try to set up a CSR policy
across national boundaries. KPMG has been developing a common framework
for its in-house corporate responsibility programmes covering almost
150 countries while continuing to give autonomy to business units (EP6,
issue 9, p3), and mobile phone group Orange has established a
Europe-wide network of national CSR co-ordinators, each of whom has
been put in charge of local programmes (EP Best Practice, issue 7).
Radford said legal services firms, which have a relatively light social
and environmental footprint, ‘have found it quite difficult in general
to develop an integrated corporate responsibility strategy because CSR
hasn’t been quite so high on their agendas’.
DLA Piper’s initial focus is on the in-house CSR framework, but it also
invited some clients to the Vienna meeting to consider how they might
become involved in community partnerships with the firm on education,
regeneration, the environment and health and wellbeing. The firm
already has relationships with Mencap and the Prince’s Trust.
Latest figures show DLA Piper lawyers around the world have so far
contributed 11,987 free hours at a notional value of £2million ($3.5m)
to pro bono work, including support for the South African Litigation
Centre, which gives legal advice to lawyers who are challenging human
rights abuses in southern Africa, principally in Angola, Lesotho and
Swaziland. DLA Piper has 3000 lawyers in 21 countries in Asia, Europe
and the US.
