Responsible Business

Responsible Business: Putting purpose into practice

How we run our business responsibly

Our long-term success as a firm depends on the health and resilience of our clients, our people, our communities and our natural environment. It should be no surprise, therefore, that a commitment to responsible growth sits right at the heart of our commercial strategy.

Our work in support of that commitment is driven from the very top of the Firm and mainstreamed into our governance. Our Board, chaired by our Senior Partner, Bart Peerless, oversees the delivery of the Firm’s strategy, including responsible business. In 2024, the Board established a dedicated Responsible Business Steering Committee (RB SteerCo) to lead our strategic thinking in this area.

RB SteerCo is chaired by Larissa Joy, a former Non-Executive Director of our Firm and includes, among Partners and senior leaders from across the business:

• Simon Ridpath, Managing Partner
• Lesley O'Leary, Chief Operating Officer and owner of our investment in environmental sustainability
• Karen Stages, Chief People Officer and owner of our work in the areas of DEI and wellbeing
• Kerry Stares, Partner and Director of Responsible Business, whose full-time role is dedicated to responsible business strategy and advisory work.

In 2025, we also formed a Next Gen Responsible Business Advisory Group. This diverse group of next generation talent, drawn from across the Firm, acts as a valuable sounding board and source of ideas for our RB SteerCo, helping to ensure we hear a wider range of perspectives when developing and implementing our Responsible Business Strategy.

What responsible business means to us

In 2024, our RB SteerCo carried out an extensive consultation exercise to understand which responsible business issues are most material for our Firm, both in terms of their impact on our success and profitability, and their impact on people and planet.

This double materiality assessment involved listening to a wide cross-section of our people and a diverse group of our clients and intermediaries.

Through this work, we identified six areas in which we are best placed to drive positive impact and that are most critical to our ability to win the work of the future, continue to attract top talent and enhance our market reputation. These impact areas form the core of our Responsible Business Strategy 2025-2028.

“Responsible business issues are increasingly core to our clients’ businesses and an important part of how they mitigate risk and drive return. Our Responsible Business Strategy is designed to guide the decisions we make as a Firm and to demonstrate to our clients that we are right the advisers to support them in this area, not least because we walk the walk ourselves and speak the language of sustainability fluently.”
Kerry Stares, Partner and Director of Responsible Business.

The ideas and initiatives that underpin our Responsible Business Strategy 2025-2028 are not new. We have been investing in responsible business for many years, including deepening our thought leadership to support a growing number of clients with ESG issues, expanding our award-winning pro bono practice, driving towards gender balance in leadership, improving how we measure our carbon footprint and significantly reducing our direct (Scope 1 and 2) emissions. We rank highly against our peers in external benchmarks including, for the second consecutive year, scoring in the Top 20 firms in the Lamphouse Responsible Business Report 2025.

This, however, is our first multi-year strategy that is comprehensive, developed following extensive internal and external consultation and designed to support our ambition to be the leading legal advisors to private capital. We are pleased to share it with you.

Our six areas of impact

For each impact area we have set three strategic ambitions for 2028 – statements of how we want our Firm to grow and develop. Underpinning these ambitions we have set a series of goals, together with firmwide KPIs that help us to measure our progress, celebrate successes and course correct as necessary. These firmwide KPIs will be reinforced with divisional, group and individual KPIs where possible and appropriate, and feed into our performance review process, bonus awards and Partner remuneration.

For more information about our progress against our 2025/26 goals and a preview of what we will be working on in 2026/27 to advance towards our 2028 ambitions, please see our annual review.