DWF, the business law firm, hosted a meeting on behalf of GACSO,
the Global Association of Corporate Sustainability Officers in Manchester
yesterday. Here’s what I learnt.
Ty Jones, Head of Value and Sustainability opened by explaining
how sustainability affects a legal practice.
Sustainability is now part of the business plan and is far
more than window dressing. It’s a platform for delivering outstanding results
and a clear differentiator when every legal practice is trying to promote
itself as a deliverer of excellence. The drive to sustainability is led by
stakeholder expectations. No client wants to be associated with a supplier with
a bad reputation, and vice versa. The question is whether the professional firm
is a value limiter or a value creator. The value limiter concentrates on
business as usual to the exclusion of all else. The value creator is a thought
leader, a strategic thinker and will challenge clients. For credibility, there
must come a point where the firm will refuse to do business with clients that
are recklessly unsustainable. Even so, the firm will not hold clients to
standards that it cannot meet itself. The firm as value creator will add value
by challenging clients and thus will limit its clients to the best clients.
Equally it will attract and retain the best professional partners to work in
the firm.
Until two years ago DWF had no Environmental Management
System (EMS). Now it has ISO 14001, as expected by its clients. Clients putting
work out to tender are going far beyond asking whether there is an
environmental policy. Now they ask for details of the EMS and want to know how
it can add value to their own sustainability objectives. Some clients can have
rigorous sustainability standards and yet demand less than sustainable service
from their lawyers. An example is insisting on face-to-face meetings at remote
locations, when the same result could be achieved with a conference call .
It’s important to influence the supply chain as far as a
relatively small organisation such as DWF can. The firm has therefore established
structured supply partnerships including benchmarks, quarterly reviews and
regular discussions.
Employee engagement is important from the moment of
induction into the firm. Many people don’t realise that sustainability goes far
wider than environmental issues. They also don’t realise that actions with a
sustainability consequence – use of materials, use of energy, disposal of waste
– also have a financial consequence. Smart use of technology, not just using
technology in an unplanned way, can make people’s working lives more
sustainable. The recent acquisition of Cobbetts by DWF, involving the
absorption of 500 people into existing premises, demonstrated exactly how this
can work.
Sustainability is firmly embedded in the DWF business plan.
Later in the session
Lynne Cook of DWF spoke about sustainability and real estate and Alan Knight of
BITC explained the background and objectives of GACSO. More on this in a later
blog.
