Sustainability
Sustainability, Environmental & Corporate Social Responsibility
Lawson West Solicitors is committed to provide clients and employees with a caring experience and a socially responsible, sustainable and ethical work environment.
Our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) vision is to ensure that all clients realise our CSR goals and our strategy of providing a positive contribution to the communities in which we operate.
CSR Approach
Our business strategy embraces our core values:
Welcoming, Confident, Supportive, Knowledgeable and Dependable.
We aim to grow our business, we do this by:
- Demonstrating professionalism
- Inspiring trust and confidence
- Striving for service excellence to both clients and colleagues
- A commitment to clear communication
CSR plays an important part in how we run our business, how we incentivise our employees, and how we embrace ethics and diversity within our law firm to ensure that our CSR policy is not simply a policy document but is part of who we are and our culture. We aim to ‘walk the talk’.
CSR Committee
Lawson West has an active CSR committee and policy in the firm which is responsible for ensuring our CSR approach and strategy is adopted and that the firm acts on its promises to the community. Our CSR strategy and scheme is broken down into four main areas and we adopt continual improvement of our environmental performance in relation to our services and operations:
- Community
Our firm made up of nearly 70 staff is active in the local business community. Not only do we engage in digital and face to face networking, we look for ways to support local business enterprise and the development of the towns in which we operate. We support education and learning including attending school careers evenings, university law student events as well as providing Citizens Advice employment law support.
- Charity
Our employees and solicitors are active throughout the year supporting charities in different ways. Our chosen charities are: LOROS, Rainbows and Action Homeless.
The CSR committee takes nominations for employee preferences for charities we support on an annual basis. Each eligible employee is entitled to one paid day per holiday year to participate in charity events and activities away from work for selected charities whom we partner with. Our support is broad and includes sport-related fundraising like football, snooker and marathons, the provision of free legal advice (pro bono see below), other fundraising activities including quiz events, donating gifts and time at Christmas, cake bakes and raffles to raise important funds. We’ve raised over £15,000 for LOROS since we partnered with them.
- Pro Bono
Our staff are committed to giving-back, supporting and involvement in our local charity community. Lawyers do sometimes provide legal services to charity organisations for contract advice, and depending on the type of advice and duration, this can be on a pro bono or chargeable basis. Initial employment advice via Citizen’s Advice is not charged for and employment pro bono advice is undertaken for charities including:
- Biodiversity
We embrace biodiversity and the benefits of conservation and the importance of our natural environment. Our cleaners use detergents that are planet-ecologically-friendly. Kitchens and bathrooms use eco-friendly soaps and recycled paper towels and toilet paper. We are looking at ways to increase the number of green plants in our offices which also contributes to staff wellbeing. Where we maintain office ornamental garden space, we don’t allow the use of harmful insecticides and aim to have areas where insects and pollinators can thrive.
- Environment & Sustainability
Our firm is active in its support for environmental best practice. The firm currently undertakes the following environmental actions related to the legal services we provide. Our environmental actions aim to help us to be greener, environmentally responsible and to help future generations to enjoy the planet. The responsible board-member responsible for our environmental impact is Director Ashley Hunt and we believe passionately about the environment.
- Carbon – we aim to be carbon-neutral by 2030 in accordance with the Government’s objectives and net zero strategy. Our policy is to seek suppliers with green credentials.
- Consumption of energy, water and other resources – we have installed low energy LED lighting across both Lawson West offices. We turn off lights after office closure times and various lights are on automatic shut-down if there is no movement beneath. Heating of offices is on a timer and only active at weekends if the temperature falls significantly low and needed to avoid freezing pipes, or to maintain IT server room temperature stability. Our Dominus Way office in Leicester is fitted with air conditioning and Market Harborough office uses portable air conditioning units, used during heatwave temperatures.
- Pollution – we continually look at ways to reduce our use of paper, to recycle and to reduce our energy consumption where pollution may be an impact. Noise pollution is limited in legal services.
- Waste disposal/recycling – across the firm you will see recycling bins, encouraging recycling of waste in kitchens and articles that can be saved and recycled. These are emptied weekly.
- Consumption of paper – where paper is used, it is sourced from responsible suppliers of recycled or sustainable paper manufacturer. We aim to reduce the need for paper and waste and make our business greener and more efficient. Confidential waste paper for destruction is kept to a minimum, collected in confidential bins and returned to our recyclers where an industrial shredder cross-cuts the paper to the highest standards of confidentiality and it is then mixed and baled ready for recycling.
- Consumption of printer cartridges – our printer cartridges are collected from each office and returned to cartridge suppliers who recycle the parts that can be recycled and dispose of non-recycled parts in an environmentally-ethical way.
- Production of letterhead paper – we embrace digital communication with clients and aim to produce digital letters sent by email. This has dramatically reduced our use of hard copy letters and paper. We also file documents about legal matters digitally, which are kept on the ‘matter file’, accessible by specific team employees only.
- Production and disposal of correspondence and paper files – law firms have many legal documents and some are printed out for signing, like Wills and Agreements. We actively scan documents to our cloud-based system so that we keep the printing of originals and duplicates to a minimum. We scan documents and store them digitally to minimise the need for off-site document storage.
- Court papers – evidence papers used in the court system have historically been photocopied and presented to Barristers to prepare the case in lever arch files. The process of creating instructions to barristers and where permitted court bundles is now digital at Lawson West.
- Archiving – the process of archiving paper-based files has moved to be digital. We no longer archive hard copy paper documents from clients, unless official documents such as Wills, Powers of Attorney or Deeds.
- Pension Scheme – our employee workplace pension scheme offers investment portfolio opportunities to invest in ethical funds, considering environmental, social or governance (ESG) policies of companies and funds to determine low ESG risk scores and therefore lower environmental or ethical impact.
- Travel to and from the office and to clients, hospices, court etc.
- we have dramatically reduced the need for travel for our eligible employees by offering a comprehensive working from home policy and hybrid working environment.
- the nature of legal services dictates that we do still need to meet clients face-to-face to discuss their legal documents or attend court on occasion, but we encourage the use of Teams for digital communication and meetings so that mileage and use of car fuel is kept to an absolute minimum.
- we encourage staff to buddy on journeys where there is more than one person attending.
- our staff are invited to engage in a Cycle-To-Work Scheme enabling them to lease hire a bicycle to travel to and from work. This reduces car fuel emissions.
