City law firms will have to play a leading role in promoting corporate responsibility if they are to attract and retain the best staff, the senior partner at Allen & Overy said today.

Guy Beringer, in the second of a planned three essays on the future of the UK legal profession, said the sector had witnessed an "inexorable" change in the past 10 years and firms could no longer focus solely on their bottom line.

In the previous essay, he criticised the profession for its obsession with "PEP" (profits per equity partner) as a measure of success. This time, he argued firms such as Allen & Overy are competing for the services of a "mobile" workforce that values more than money when deciding which organisations they wish to work for.

Recent staff surveys had shown that more than 92 per cent of Allen & Overy employees wanted the firm to be "socially responsible" and 87 per cent cared about its environmental policy, he said.

"A cynic may say that no-one is likely to answer questions on these topics in the negative," Mr Beringer said, "but there is no denying that people now wish to feel good about their working environment and are no longer willing to put up with feeling alienated from it."

The law profession in the UK had lagged behind the US in using its expertise and knowledge to play a wider role in society, Mr Beringer said.

Law firms have traditionally displayed their social conscience through pro bono activities or memberships of law committees and Bar associations, but Mr Beringer said these activities had always been treated as extraneous to their daily operations. Financial self-interest and the public interest have converged, he argued, and promoting corporate responsibility is now a necessary function of business rather than just good public relations.

"We are not doing this to the exclusion of running an efficient and profitable practice; it is complementary to the pursuit of such practice," he said.

Mr Beringer identifies four broad areas of responsibility: to the firm's staff; to the legal profession; to local communities; and to the environment.

He said Allen & Overy must accept responsibility for its staff beyond "normal contractual requirements" and begin implementing flexible working arrangements and alternative career paths, particularly for female lawyers with families. He also called for a closer working relationship between lawyers and non-lawyers.

Mr Beringer said the firm was reconsidering its relationship with the wider marketplace and had introduced "non-financial criteria into its procurement processes" - though he does not go into detail. He pledged to support local suppliers more proactively in order to "stimulate local economies" in places where the firm operates.

Allen & Overy had invested in reading schemes in local schools in London and donated food, clothes and labour to an orphanage in Bangkok.

Mr Beringer also called for City firms to take a leadership role in wider debates over the role of the law in society.

"We try to take seriously the special role of the law and access to justice in the modern world and we believe that we have a wider duty to devote resources to maintaining the rule of law for future generations," he said. "If we do not devote resource to this issue, it is hard to see how we can expect anyone else to do so."

Addressing the challenge of environmental responsibility, Mr Beringer said law firms must forgo the easy alternative of securing carbon neutral status and concentrate instead on the more challenging task of “achieving real carbon reductions”. This could include "relatively simple" changes such as switching office electricity supplies to renewable energy sources.

Read the full essay here

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