Senior and Managing Partners' statement

Our ambition and our leadership within the legal profession motivate our commitment to corporate responsibility. It’s an important expression of the Principles on which our strategy is founded and will help us achieve our overall goals as a firm. Our people support our CR activity, particularly pro bono work and volunteering, because they feel it’s the right thing to do. So do clients: many nowadays seek evidence of our CR credentials, and a growing number are partnering with us on CR initiatives.

Our inaugural CR Report 2008 was a platform for improved alignment and cohesion. It articulated objectives with one-year and three-year goals in relation to our people, our communities and the environment. Our second report is an opportunity to consider our progress and look ahead.

People.

The people component of our CR strategy, with its two core elements of development and diversity, was dominated by an unprecedented downturn. In the toughest markets that many of us here have seen, we made people redundant in 2008 and 2009 across a number of offices as part of a process to reshape the firm for the future. These were difficult decisions and we discuss them in more detail in managing corporate responsibility. Redundancy has an enormous impact on those involved. But we believe these were necessary steps and the firm will emerge stronger for having taken them.

Diversity.

Another disappointment was the slow progress made in bringing more women into the partnership. We explain what we are doing to address this issue in the section on our people. We may have a long way to go, but we’re not standing still. Clifford Chance was recognised as one of the top 50 places ‘Where Women Want to Work’ in the UK by The Times/Aurora in October 2008 – for the second year running. We launched a new e-learning platform for diversity, and in New York the firm scored 100% in the 2009 Corporate Equality Index run by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, which rates policies and practices pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees.

Development.

We continue to introduce measures that improve the quality of the training that people receive, so they remain at the leading edge of the fields in which they work and can give our clients the best service and advice. For instance the Clifford Chance Academy, which co-ordinates our international training programmes, ran 15% more courses in 2008/09 than the previous year.

Community.

The three strands to our community work, as outlined in our inaugural report, are access to justice, access to finance and access to education (see our community).

The not-for-profit sector is not immune to the financial crisis, especially in countries where state funding for charities and non governmental organisations (NGOs) may be falling away or remaining flat. In 2008/09 the amount of time we donated to the communities in which we work increased by 15% to more than 91,000 hours while our revenue dipped by 5%. This underlines the commitment we make every day to our community partners, and wherever possible we will continue to support organisations whose goals are strongly aligned with our own CR objectives.

The range of our activities is broad, providing opportunities to work collectively – a multi-national team of Clifford Chance lawyers is advising the UN on its report into international businesses’ corporate governance – and individually: 220 lawyers donated their time to social welfare legal advice at FreeLaw drop-in clinics in London during 2008/09.

The Clifford Chance Foundation (see our community) announced in our CR report 2008 is having an impact. The firm has donated money to support a range of flagship programmes, including Avocats Sans Frontières, Save the Children and Room to Read – in total more than 40 initiatives in 20 different countries were approved for funding.

Environment.

Our strategic and successful focus on our environmental impact through an increasingly international programme has achieved positive results (see Environment: Managing our impact). Our international Reduce, Reuse, Recycle campaign has generated momentum in every office in the firm, through initiatives that often have direct community benefits.

Although our business environment remains challenging, the progress we made in last year’s difficult markets is a measure of our commitment to corporate responsibility. As a partnership, we see CR as a shared opportunity for partners and employees to take the right steps together and wherever possible as an opportunity to work with our clients. We would welcome your feedback on any of the information in this report.

David Childs
Managing Partner

Stuart Popham
Senior Partner