Corporate Social Responsibility in Oxford
Our strategic approach to CSR
Our over-arching CSR strategy in our Oxford office is:
To focus on the contribution we can make locally by putting CSR at the centre of the office's culture and by embedding CSR in the way we do business. We aim to do this through organising our CSR activities into three areas:
- Community involvement and pro bono
- Environment and climate change
- Workplace
To ensure our CSR activities are aligned with our strategic focus, the Oxford office has established a CSR Committee consisting of both legal and non-legal business services staff. The Committee aims to engage with all of our people to share ideas on, and encourage participation in, CSR activities. Click here for an outline of our activities.
Our policies
1. Community involvement and pro bono
We put an emphasis on community involvement in our locality and recognise that it – including pro bono legal work – has a value for the individuals who undertake it, as well as the local community.
The aims of our professional and pro bono involvement are:
- to provide a service to the Oxford community of which we are part, focusing on local not-for-profit organisations working for the public interest;
- to improve access to justice and legal advice to those who might otherwise find such access difficult; and
- to help our people who get involved in our professional and pro bono activities in the community to develop as a result.
The aims of our charitable activities are:
- to support charities, individuals and other groups who are working to achieve charitable objectives in and around Oxford;
- to give particular support to charities, individuals and other groups who do not have access to sources of public funding; and
- to help those charitable initiatives our people have a direct or indirect involvement with, or which have a particular relevance or importance to them.
Our policy is to encourage all of our people to undertake pro bono and community involvement work, and to recognise it when assessing their respective contributions to our business. We also want to work with our clients on CSR initiatives, as we know that CSR is becoming increasingly important to them too.
2. Environment and climate change
Although locally focused, we recognise that our activities have an environmental impact nationally and internationally. We impact on the environment in the following ways:
- emission of greenhouse gases – both directly through our activities, and indirectly by the way our people travel to and from our office in Oxford;
- waste generation; and
- use of energy and natural resources.
To mitigate our impact on the environment, we aim to reduce the amount of waste we generate, to use resources more efficiently and to reduce our carbon footprint. We also aim to source goods and services from suppliers who take environmental and ethical considerations seriously.
We a member of the Legal Sector Alliance, a group of law firms committed to reducing their carbon footprint and adopting environmentally sustainable practices. In addition, we have commited to taking action by:
- reviewing energy-saving measures every six months;
- putting in place incentives for our people to travel in and out of work in an environmentally sustainable fashion;
- continuing to put in place measures aimed at increasing recycling and reducing waste reduction;
- using products sourced on a sustainable environmental and ethical basis; and
- engaging with our people to strengthen the culture of environmental sustainability in our office.
Workplace
We value and actively encourage a workplace where everyone is valued for their skills, contribution and potential, regardless of age, gender, race, nationality, colour, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability or religion. We want to recruit people from as wide a pool as possible, but we also recognise that it is important to recruit people locally from all kinds of backgrounds.
In consequence, we aim to:
- continue to monitor disability, ethnicity, gender and age within our Oxford office, and put in place further measures to improve our understanding of diversity in our workplace;
- develop and extend the ways in which we support our people through different stages in their lives;
- engage with local organisations in Oxford to ensure that employment and work experience opportunities are genuinely open to all, with particular emphasis on developing our links with local community schools.
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