A City law firm doesn’t have a high street name to protect: its reputation with clients rests on its ability to attract – and more importantly – retain the best and brightest employees. Yet staff turnover in the big city firms is high. Can community investment even begin to tackle this?
Linklaters: issues facing a professional services firm
A City law firm doesn’t have a high street name to protect: its reputation with clients rests on its ability to attract – and more importantly – retain the best and brightest employees. Yet staff turnover in the big city firms is high. Can community investment even begin to tackle this?
In answer, Caroline Knighton, Linklaters’ community investment manager thinks a big part of her role is to try – and she counts one of her biggest successes over the past two and a half years as getting volunteering mainstreamed into the organisation’s culture, so that both lawyers and non-lawyers can feel they both gain, and contribute, beyond the workplace.
A survey of volunteers’ satisfaction at the end of 1999, based on over 50 respondents, revealed almost four in five thought it had improved their attitude to both Linklaters and their own jobs. Asked about impact on their development:
96% thought it had improved their communications skills;
90% their ability to work with others;
82% their leadership/ management skills;
62% their ability to juggle their workload;
almost all had enjoyed their involvement, and said they would recommend volunteering to others.
Beyond this, the firm cannot yet establish a direct link between volunteering and employee retention. However this is now on the radar screen at the very highest levels within the firm, where percentages of staff shifting out to other firms or other jobs is monitored closely.
Flicking through the Linklaters internal community relations guide, there is a variety of different volunteering options on offer, headed up as opportunities for lawyers, for trainees, and for staff, both legal and non-legal. How best to use the core skills and talents of the business is always an issue in a good community investment strategy – and setting a highly qualified lawyer to digging the garden at the local children’s home might not yield the best outcome for either the home or the lawyer.
‘Half our employees aren’t lawyers’ says Caroline, however, ‘and although we have focused much more on pro-bono work over the past couple of years, some lawyers just want to do something different’. So the firm’s partner organisations range from specialised legal advice institutions through to schools and charities. The emphasis tends to be on the knowledge or skills that both partners can gain – but this is interpreted flexibly.
A qualified lawyer can opt to commit some of their time to legal pro bono – giving legal advice to a charity or a free advice centre, exactly as they would to a client, but at no – or reduced – charge. They could spend a morning, in the firm’s time, drafting pleadings, affidavits and notices of appeal for individuals without legal representation at the Royal Courts of Justice. Or they could take on cases from the Free Representation Unit – covering issues like ethnic or sexual discrimination, unfair dismissal or redundancy, as well as social security or housing cases.
Linklaters employees can themselves suggest organisations they would like to receive pro bono work. The firm publishes criteria for taking on new pro bono clients, which includes their fit with the Community Investment Committee’s strategy, value for developing employee skills, and opportunity to provide pro bono experience to departments which might not otherwise get it.
Employees taking on pro bono will normally be based in the property, trusts or litigation departments, as their skills are the most transferable – some will work on issues very similar to those faced by their blue-chip clients, others have to adapt to very different types of client and litigation. Half the pro-bono hours worked by the firm are from the litigation department alone. The firm worked over £1.5 million-worth of pro-bono time in total during 2000.
Wider employee volunteering options focus on projects in central London, Tower Hamlets and Hackney. Good examples are the literacy and numeracy support schemes at Thomas Fairchild primary school in Hackney, where employees spend half an hour helping a child learn to read or improve their maths. Or some might volunteer after work at an advice café run by the St Botolph’s Project for homeless people, or at Salter’s City Foyer, mentoring people as they try to make the move from homelessness to independence.
Lawyers with a less transferable skill – mergers and acquisitions, for example – might opt for this. Even more important, in terms of the firm’s headcount, are the non-legal staff who make up half the people employed at Linklaters.
The firm is keen to encourage volunteering beyond the traditional pro bono departments, and this is increasing, contributing an additional £0.7 million in volunteering time during 2000, bringing the total volunteering hours to £2.2 million that year. A recent request for staff to help children learn to read received 193 responses for twenty places.
Nearly all pro bono work takes place during office hours. There are also two full-time secondments and one part time, the latter to the Tate Gallery. Volunteering is not related to staff pay or covered in appraisals, other than technical appraisals of pro bono work.
Value to community?
Is this valued in the community? The answer seems to be an unequivocal yes: a recent OFSTED report for Thomas Fairchild primary school in Hackney, for example, makes several very positive references to the school’s close relationship with the firm, and its impact on standards of English. The school’s head teacher adds that the children have also gained socially through meeting another working adult who is neither teacher nor parent, yet who takes an interest in their achievements. Parents have asked that the scheme be expanded.
Some charities need general organisational support, where a business person’s skills will be particularly helpful – clarifying policy objectives for example. But the St Botolph’s project for homeless people needs people to help serve food, or simply build relationships with clients, who often find it easier to open up to volunteers than to full-time staff.
The other main option for a Linklaters employee is to raise money for charities. In a range of fundraising activities for example, including First and Last, a programme modelled on the Children’s Promise, where staff donated salaries for their last working hour of 1999 and the first of 2000, staff raised £260,000 worldwide for a range of charities under the heading Revive our Cities. Beyond this, Linklaters’ community awards scheme has so far matched £ for £ money raised by 27 individual members of staff, and six staff teams. The scheme’s annual budget is £25,000, with awards generally capped at £500 for individuals and £1,000 for teams. The firm also encourages the CAF Give as You Earn scheme, which can include donations to the staff’s charity fund, CharityLink. Community investment team
Caroline herself trained as a lawyer – important, she says, for getting other lawyers onside. She works three days each week, and reports to John Ledlie, the firm’s Partnership Secretary, who is responsible for the day-to-day running of the partnership, and who in turn reports to the firm’s senior partner. Caroline is also accountable to a Corporate Good Citizenship Committee, a sub-committee of the firm’s main decision-making body, the International Partnership Committee. The CGC comprises 12 partners. A more hands-on body is the Community Investment Committee, comprising just five partners, who take a close interest in developments.
Spend
The firm’s annual donations spend currently stands at £630,000 in the UK – when added to the pro bono and volunteering time, the figure rises to £2.98 million, which represents a minimum of 1% of profits, bringing the firm into line with its publicly-owned peers.
The budget covers Linklaters’ main London location, where 2,043 are based, and a small administrative office in Colchester offering administrative and IT support. Three-quarters of the budget is spent supporting the three activities described above, with another 20 percent on arts sponsorships (handled by John Ledlie), and five percent allocated to causes at partners’ discretion.
Achievements to date
Caroline has spent the last two years with a familiar challenge: converting ad-hoc activities into a strategy – putting more investment into fewer activities, which are mutually reinforcing where possible.
The firm’s community investment mission is now:
To help provide free legal advice and representation to those who are unable to afford it; and
To help regenerate communities in the vicinity of Linklaters offices which are affected by social exclusion.
Focus issues are law, education, homelessness, health, and social welfare.
Caroline sees her main achievements to date as making community investment a recognised part of the firm and building better relationships with the organisations Linklaters has opted to support. She is particularly proud of the firm’s mention in Thomas Fairchild school’s OFSTED report (see above), and of response within the firm to her strategy of selecting partners which need a broader range of legal and business skills – thus opening volunteering to a broader cross-section of staff.
Future challenges
Caroline’s team is about to grow to three. Her assistant will take on the running of the bulk of the firm’s employee volunteering programme and the administration of the charitable budget. They gain a new administrator in March, leaving Caroline with room to take on new challenges.
She sees a global programme as the crucial next step. Linklaters & Alliance actually has a membership of five firms, making a network of 34 offices around the world – most are Linklaters, with four in the Germany practice operating under the name Linklaters Oppenholf & Radlers, and the other firms having eight offices between them. Caroline now has agreement from the International Partnership Committee to translate the UK programme, with appropriate local adjustments, to all the firm’s offices, working on a similar budgetary allocation to that established in London.
Caroline also wants to continue to grow the proportion of staff volunteering across the firm.
Wider CSR issues
We associate law firms with long hours and mountains of paper. Also with their clients, and the activities those companies undertake.
Linklaters is taking steps to address the first two, and acknowledges that there is a particularly strong business case to ensure employees are well-looked after, where volunteering opportunities will only ever form part of a mix of broader development and satisfaction issues. On work-life balance, Linklaters adopted a flexible working scheme for employees more than ten years ago, and then introduced a pioneering scheme of flexible working for its partners in May 1997 – the first among legal firms. The scheme was responding to employees’ difficulties in juggling work and family commitments, and includes part-time working, home working, paternity leave and adoption leave. Currently a little over 7% of women at Linklaters are on some form of flexible working.
As for the environment, again there is growing awareness within the firm of the need to monitor environmental impacts, particularly through employee travel and paper use. The firm will be giving more priority to this in future.
It is to be hoped that corporate clients will support efforts by a sector with relatively low public visibility to continue to address wider CSR issues in the future.