A Collective Vision.
Linklaters first established a legal practice in 1838. Nearly 175 years later, our firm and our vision is much larger - we aspire to be the world’s leading global law firm. Each of our partners is responsible for continued stewardship towards this collective vision.
We have reflected at length on what responsibility means for a leading law firm like Linklaters. By far, the firm’s greatest impact on the wider world is through the advice we provide our clients. In essence, our greatest responsibilities are to provide our clients with the highest quality advice and excellent service, to be judicious about who we act for and, above all, to act with integrity in everything we do. All our responsibilities to our clients, to our colleagues and to wider society support the long-term, sustainable achievement of our vision.
In this report, we explore our responsibilities in greater detail and our performance in achieving them. We have achieved a great deal. We continue to advise on some of the most market-changing transactions, such as the renminbi bonds discussed in the clients and markets pages. Volunteering levels have reached 25% in all but two countries, and we are more efficient than ever before; for example, our carbon emissions are just 71% of what they were five years ago. Many of our challenges, however, are long-standing and have no quick fixes. Work-life balance is a continuing challenge in a high-performance culture with global clients that need 24/7, 365-days-a-year service. And though we have made excellent progress on gender diversity at entry level, our progress at partner level, as with most major law firms, has been more limited. We do not have the answers to these challenges yet, but we will keep searching.
Finally, we need to do more to build engagement among our people. As you will read in the people pages of this report, we have made some good progress, particularly on diversity and inclusion, but we still have a lot more to do. All our colleagues in 27 offices around the world, share a set of common values - excellence, teamwork, imagination, determination, commercial judgement and integrity. We need to ensure that our colleagues see the evidence of this every day.
For the Executive Summary of this report in PDF format, please click here. If you would like to know more, please send us a comment at corporate.responsibility@linklaters.com. We look forward to hearing from you.
