Episode 4 - Beyond the Billable: ESG, Inclusion and Social Impact at Weil

So, Amy, I'm going to just start with you and ask you to just explain what ESG actually means.

Thanks, Pip.

So ESG is both a helpful and unhelpful acronym, I think.

It stands for environmental, social and governance factors.

which is obviously an incredibly broad church of issues that all relate to the environment, to climate, to human well-being, but also to people management and corporate management.

Loads of different factors, which is why it's hard to sort of pin it into one specific practice area or one specific initiative.

I think on the sort of client work side, increased clarity has come to ESG through the introduction of lots of laws and regulations, which are much more specific on things like forced labor or modern slavery or climate change standards or emissions reporting or whatever.

There's loads and loads of them.

On the internal side, there's less of a need for sort of specifics, obviously, in terms of law and regulation, perhaps.

But we look at initiatives, particularly relating to environmental sustainability.

So the sustainability of our office space, how we deal with things like plastics, food wastage.

the use of our renewable energy, all of those things are factors which I work with the facilities team on to think about areas where we can improve.

And what's interesting is where these two sort of areas, the internal and the external, intersect.

So often in pitching for work, we receive requests for information about our own sustainability and ESG credentials.

So that's where you see that these issues are important to clients.

And it's important for us to obviously showcase what we do, what we do internally, but for the purposes of winning external work.

Okay, fantastic.

And how is your role sort of... moved into this area? Because you joined as a corporate lawyer, was it, on the corporate side?

Yeah, I trained at Herbert Smith a long time ago and qualified as a corporate lawyer and worked as a private equity, but also general corporate associate there for a number of years.

I moved to Weill, yeah, in a corporate capacity and the sustainability work started to come in for me probably around 2022, 2023. sort of on the side because no one was quite sure where it where it fitted or what to do with it which is which obviously ties to what I said earlier about this being a very holistic area which touches lots of practice areas but anyway the questions sort of kept coming and kept coming to me and at some point during 2024 I had a conversation with senior people internally about what workload and what the next few years would look like.

And we made the decision that I would focus on this area because there was sufficient work to need a dedicated resource, albeit that the role is a bit different to conventional roles within a law firm.

either on the internal side or on the fee earning side it it's a hybrid role and it's a cross-practice role but you need a sort of you almost need like a coordinator with with legal expertise to work with all of the different practice areas so that we can be consistent in our advice yeah um you know to ensure that we're not saying something to do with esg metrics in a financing matter which is inconsistent to what we're saying about esg metrics in a corporate matter so That's what I do.

It's

quite a lot.

It's quite a lot.