Corporate Responsibility.

Community Investment

Everyone at Linklaters is encouraged to get involved in our extensive and award-winning community investment programme, and there are so many ways you can volunteer: mentoring secondary school students or disadvantaged people starting business ventures; helping at employability workshops; advising at law centres; representing pro bono clients before courts and tribunals; setting up non-profit organisations as charities; delivering seminars on legal topics to community groups and many, many more.

Supporting Education Initiatives

Education plays a key part in our Community Investment (CI) programme. We commit 1% of our global pre-tax profits to the community in volunteering time, money and in-kind donations. So from mentoring in an East London school to far-reaching education programmes promoting lasting social change in sub-Saharan Africa, we support a wide range of initiatives aimed at helping people reach their full potential.

At a global level, we partnered with Camfed (the Campaign for Female Education), an innovative organisation devoted to girls’ education and the empowerment of young women in rural Africa. Linklaters worked pro bono to deliver a major report on Camfed’s operating model which meant visiting remote areas in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi to interview girls, parents, teachers, government officials and village leaders, identifying the key advantages of Camfed’s approach and sharing our findings with other Non-Governmental Organisations.

Legal Aid

Beyond this our global projects offer the chance to get involved in groundbreaking, cutting-edge transactional pro bono work. For instance, a team of trainees and associates in our capital markets department recently advised Charity Bank on a capital-raising issue to finance its social enterprise work - the first finance deal of its kind in the charitable sector. Teams of lawyers have also assisted a local microfinance organisation with advice on the setting up of a wholesale business lending company to provide loans to new and growing enterprises among disadvantaged groups that are unable to access finance from traditional commercial channels.

Pro Bono work is an important area of our Community Investment programme, enabling us to help advise those who can’t afford legal advice or denied legal access, whilst also developing ourselves and our skills. As a Linklaters employee you will even have opportunities to be seconded to charities such as Mary Ward Legal Centre, the Prince’s Trust and the Free Representation Unit, allowing an extra dimension to pro Bono.

This isn’t the extent of how you can get involved by any means: we have many projects on the go at any one time, so there are plenty of opportunities waiting. And if you have your own idea of how you can help a cause in an area local to our offices, the community investment team are always keen to hear about it. To find out more about the innovative pro bono and community investment work of the firm, please click here.

Our Environmental Policy

Our environment programme is a natural extension of taking our responsibilities seriously. We measure and monitor our global carbon footprint and have implemented targets to help us to reduce the energy, waste, paper, consumables and water we use.

Since 2007 we have celebrated United Nations World Environment Day. We used the day to raise people’s awareness of our environmental impact and how we can all contribute to mitigate the effects of climate change. This year we ran a global photography competition and over 200 our of people submitted photographs under the theme People and Nature. Over 1200 voters brushed up on their knowledge of global forests and of the firm’s environmental achievements and selected their favourite photograph with the winning photographer coming from our Hong Kong office.