Linklaters

The core focus of our pro bono programme is our Venture Catalysts theme. We use our legal skills to grow the capabilities of our community partners, helping them to innovate solutions to poverty and deprivation. We are helping develop social finance structures, offering analysis on governance and promoting the rule of law, among other pro bono initiatives. Our focus on the quality of our contribution, which has entailed greater application of our commercial legal expertise and cross-border capabilities, is delivering a greater impact. Our lawyers are also benefiting in their professional development from applying their skills pro bono, particularly in fields not typically associated with pro bono, such as capital markets and financial regulation.  

In FY10/11:

• We grew the sophistication of our pro bono programme; the number of matters that involved more than one of our offices or more than one practice area increased by 10%.
• We developed our social finance expertise: our London, Luxembourg, New York and Düsseldorf offices assisted on innovative social finance projects. The charitable bonds we have advised on have attracted £7.5m in social investment over the past two years.
• We developed a genuinely global pro bono programme. Over two-thirds of our offices now run voluntary pro bono programmes, an increase of a third over three years.

Growing the social investment marketplace

Our New York, Düsseldorf and London offices have been advising B Lab, a visionary not-for-profit that is dedicated to supporting strong corporate responsibility practices. B Lab has been behind the creation of “B Corporations”, a new corporate vehicle that gives legal recognition to organisations that meet comprehensive and transparent social and environmental performance standards.

B Lab is currently addressing an issue common to B Corporations - how to obtain large-scale investment in the current economic climate. Socially motivated investors struggle with a lack of comparable, transparent social and environmental performance data on businesses. B Lab has come up with a solution: its “Global Impact Investing Rating System” (GIIRS) provides independent third party ratings of the social and environmental performance of social enterprises, as well as of for-profit companies and funds seeking investment capital. We advised on the setting up of the GIIRS legal structure, which will ultimately contribute to attracting greater investment in organisations that are creating positive social and environmental impact.

Social finance and bond issues

Over the last year, our London and Luxembourg offices, particularly our structured finance, financial regulation and tax practices, have been collaborating to develop structured finance techniques that enable charities to raise money from the capital markets. We have developed charitable bond issues with UK-based social enterprise Allia, which have raised over £7.5m in social investment over the past two years. The funding has accelerated regeneration efforts in East London, supported socially excluded young people into work and further education and has furthered the provision of affordable housing. Visit www.allia.org.uk/investing/how-it-works to find out more about charitable bonds.

Growing the capabilities of social ventures

ToughStuff provides low-income households in the developing world with affordable solar-powered products such as lamps, rechargeable batteries and mobile phone chargers. ToughStuff trains local people to become entrepreneurs to sell these products to their communities. The prices are still affordable for even the poorest households; the energy generated saves on carbon emissions, the trade of the products creates local employment and fosters enterprise, and the substitution of solar power for kerosene stoves reduces the risk of fires and improves health. 

We have an ongoing pro bono relationship with ToughStuff. This year, our Environment and Climate Change and Energy and Infrastructure departments have provided pro bono assistance to ToughStuff on distributor contracts, supply contracts, consultant agreements and product warranties.

Supporting local advice agencies

In the UK, substantial cuts and changes to the legal aid budget combined with severe reductions to local authority funding is threatening the existence of a number of our community partners, along with not-for-profit advice agencies more broadly. As lawyers, as pro bono volunteers and as long-standing supporters of advice agencies, we are deeply concerned about this.

We contribute very substantial annual resources to five key access to justice agencies in the UK, through funding, secondments, pro bono and volunteering. In the past 12 months, we have focused on building deeper  commitments to the access to justice agencies that we support in the UK to provide greater stability. This includes:

• three-year funding commitments, with an increased annual financial contribution in most instances
• assurance that the funding is unrestricted (where relevant), greatly enhancing its value to these partner organisations
• increased provision of pro bono advice from the firm to the agencies themselves. The application of our particular legal expertise for the direct benefit of the organisations we support is the best and most effective contribution that we can make. This work has ranged from advising on securing more cost-effective premises to due diligence guidance on acquisitions.

We will continue to  engage in dialogue and collaborative efforts to further the sustainability of independent not-for-profit advice agencies.

Governance and rule of law

Furthering good governance and transparency in international aid is a particular focus of our community investment programme. One example of this is our collaboration with Camfed, an organisation which supports girls’ education in Africa. At the Skoll World Forum in 2010, Linklaters and Camfed launched a report analysing Camfed’s unique governance approach which aims to ensure that local communities get direct support where they need it the most. Linklaters and Camfed are promoting the report more widely, in order to help others review the impact and transparency of international aid. Successes range from selection of the report for recognition at the Clinton Global Initiative’s Annual Meeting to the report forming part of course materials at Oxford  and Columbia Universities. On a more local level, we continue to provide pro bono assistance to our community partners in streamlining their governance processes.

Fostering the rule of law is another focus, building on our work with Lawyers Without Borders. Last year, we helped to produce and publish a digest of the entire case law of Liberia from the 1800s onwards, which was distributed to judges across the country. This year, we have been updating the digest to include recent decisions. The Liberian legal system is precedent-driven, which requires judges to take into account previous judicial decisions on the same or similar topics when giving a ruling in a case. Until recently, many judges in Liberia had only limited access to previous decisions made, and no access to an indexed digest of decisions. Our work has helped to support the rule of law in Liberia by minimising the potential for inconsistent judicial decisions.  In the long term, we hope that this contribution to the rule of law will ultimately help to foster access to justice and economic development and speed up the implementation of the UN Millennium Development Goals.