Community goals
Over the next five years, we will channel the talents and collective ambition we share across our firm, the skills and resources we use from day-to-day in our commercial activities, towards helping others to secure three fundamental entitlements: access to justice, access to finance and access to education. The experience that our people gain through these activities will enhance their development, linking our focus on investing in talent with achieving our explicit community goals.
How do we know how we're doing? By measuring our progress against clearly defined targets.
We’ve taken important steps forward. We are proud of what we’ve achieved so far in terms of pulling all our pro bono and community work together into a global programme, but we know that there is the potential to do even better in future.
We see CR as integral to the way we do business. It helps to support and drive our strategy and priorities. Over the coming year we will be working towards the targets we have set ourselves in relation to management, people, business alignment and the environment. We will also look at marketplace issues in relation to our clients, our suppliers and our engagement with regulators, governments, international bodies and the wider business community.
We’ve set ourselves clear goals. It is important to measure our progress against meaningful targets.
- We aim to achieve our management, people and business goals within a year of the publication of this report.
- We aim to achieve our environmental goals within three years, and our progress will be reviewed annually.
Our targets are outlined on the facing page. We look forward to communicating our progress in next year’s report.
Our targets for 2009
Management
1. Institute and communicate a unified global CR policy.
2. Engage our people through a CR intranet with a feedback mechanism.
3. Implement a time recording system where business services staff as well as lawyers can record time spent on pro bono and community work.
4. Increase the number of pro bono and community hours recorded globally by 10%.
5. Investigate how to maintain collection of meaningful data on the firm's performance against environmental targets, its suppliers, and the time and value of in-kind contributions to pro bono and community affairs work.
People
1. Review appraisal forms, partner selection criteria and partner performance forms to ensure that pro bono and community affairs work is assessed, encouraged and recognised .
2. Investigate and fully report on our diversity issues so that we can set meaningful targets for implementation next year.
Business alignment
1. Build further joint pro bono, community, environmental and people initiatives with our clients.
2. Encourage greater alignment of the firm's CR efforts with its technical expertise through initiatives such as microfinance and environmental groups.
