Clifford Chance has said that it must improve its public image if it is to achieve its ambition of becoming one of the world’s leading professional service providers.

The world’s biggest law firm generated record revenues last year of £1.3 billion, up 11 per cent, with profits of £1.1 million for each equity partner. Yet it has said that it must become more socially responsible if it is to continue attracting the best lawyers and clients.

The admission comes in the firm’s first corporate social responsibility (CSR) report, released next week, which measures the diversity of its workforce, its environmental impact and pro bono activities.

The 28-page report, which will be published alongside the firm’s first annual financial review, sets out a series of initiatives aimed at improving Clifford Chance’s reputation among lawyers, media, government and the wider community. The measures include reducing its reliance on non-renewable energy sources and increasing free legal advice to charitable causes.

Collectively, City law firms have drawn criticism for being excessively profit-driven and for lagging behind other employers in hiring and promoting women and ethnic minorities. Clifford Chance, with more than 2,800 lawyers, has been attacked as being particularly faceless and impersonal.

According to the CSR report, only 15 per cent of its partners are women and only 10 out of 233 partners in London are ethnic minorities. “We’d be delighted to say that our firm is an exception,” the report states. “It isn’t.”

However, David Childs, the firm's managing partner, said that Clifford Chance was determined to improve its image and to become regarded as a socially responsible business.

“We have always had a strong sense of our responsibility to pro bono and community commitments and these plans build on our long-standing activity,” Mr Childs said. “Our ambition is to develop a corporate social responsibility programme that is recognised as unequalled in the legal profession and ties in with our broader business strategy.”

Among the firm’s commitments for the next year is to increase pro bono work by 10 per cent. Last year, more than half of Clifford Chance’s lawyers participated in charitable activities, amounting to £18 million in billable time.

The report also sets out a series of measures to reduce the firm’s environmental impact by 2011. These include: establishing a monitoring system, buying at least 10 percent of its energy from renewable sources, reducing paper use by 10 per cent per employee and recycling a quarter of its waste.

Michael Smyth, Clifford Chance’s head of public policy, said: “I think [the report] is about process as much as principle. What we have been keen to do is leave behind the rather ad hoc approach of old in the hope of developing a focused programme.”

Although City firms devote millions of pounds each year to charitable causes, they have recently faced increasing pressure to operate with greater transparency.

In 2004, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, the world’s third-largest law firm by revenue behind Clifford Chance and Linklaters, became the first City firm to release an audited CSR report.

John Blain, Freshfields’ partner responsible for CSR, said that the firm had made “significant improvements” on diversity, environmental impact and community engagement. But, he added, “Some of our goals will only be achieved by sustained effort over the longer term.”

Adrian Barlow, head of the property practice at Pinsent Masons and an outspoken advocate for greater workplace diversity in the City, said that law firms needed to present a kinder face in order to compete in a difficult recruitment market.

Clients were also demanding to see an improvement, Mr Barlow said. “There is a natural cultural fit between those clients who value their workforce and the communities in which they work and the law firms they want to work with.”

Pinsent Masons is the only City law firm on a list of the UK’s 100 most diverse employers maintained by Stonewall, the gay lobbying group.

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