Sustainability at Travers Smith

In all our dealings, Travers Smith is mindful of the need to create and evolve a sustainable business for all our stakeholders and wider society. We continually seek to embed this approach, and challenge how to create further improvements in sustainability in the day-to-day running of our business.

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Our environmental policy

Our commitment

Environmental issues are one of the biggest challenges facing the modern world. As a leading business, we want to do our bit to drive change.

In our position, we can do so much more to help not just ourselves, but also our colleagues and others to create real change. We recognise the climate crisis and are actively seeking to reduce our overall carbon footprint. This is in addition to our wider goal of reducing the firm's consumption of non-sustainable and non-renewable materials, products and food, wherever possible.

We are investing more in our pro-bono efforts to ensure we help others by providing access to our legal and other skills. For example, we are actively supporting the Chancery Lane Project, a collaborative effort of UK lawyers to develop new contracts and draft legislation to help fight climate change, as well as being long-standing members of the Legal Sustainability Alliance on climate change. We remain committed to taking on similar projects where we believe our involvement can create tangible impact and improvement and, where appropriate, also to focus some of our charitable initiatives on areas of environmental protection.

By carefully monitoring our own suppliers and business partners, we hope to influence others to ensure environmental commitments remain on the agenda.

To create real change, we recognise that everyone needs to do their part and we are committed to doing ours and are long standing members of the Legal Sustainable Alliance (LSA) that support the legal communities' transition to low carbon business models.

Every new journey starts with a Thoughtful. Step.

Read our full Environmental Policy and to find out more about our environmental activities and achievements to date.

People, diversity and inclusion

Our commitment

Our approach to diversity and creating an inclusive workplace goes beyond just ticking a box.

We want everyone to be themselves at Travers Smith. We value everything that makes us unique and we recognise that celebrating our differences helps make the firm a special place to work.

Diversity is much more than how we look. It also includes how we think, our experiences, our views and our values.

We are committed to leveraging these differences to achieve true excellence and to better serve our clients and communities.

Read more about our diversity and inclusion initiatives.

CSR and pro bono

Our commitment

From working with emerging artists to supporting refugees and asylum seekers, our award winning CSR Programme is diverse, exciting and ever expanding. Our programme covers an unusually broad range of areas and touches the lives of many thousands of people from all over the country and beyond. We engage with diverse audiences and communities, which in turn helps encourage all our people to be individual, and to recognize their position not only within the business world, but also within wider society.

From a pro bono perspective "Climate, Environment and Sustainability" is a theme at the heart of our work. We are conscious of our place in an ever changing world and actively seek out opportunities to deploy our legal skills for maximum impact. Whether it be cutting edge climate related work, innovative funding solutions for clean water charities or novel social impact investing structures, we seek to engage our lawyers in such a way as to produce better legal outcomes for all and, in particular, the most vulnerable in society.

Read more about our CSR initiatives and discover more information on our pro bono activities.

Corporate governance

Our commitment

Travers Smith is committed to high standards of corporate governance through the firm's governance framework and the decisions of its Partnership Board, and demonstrates this commitment by the way in which it conducts business and carries out its responsibilities in response to the challenges and opportunities of a changing market. The Partnership Board focuses primarily upon strategy, governance, culture, regulation, the allocation of resources and monitors the firm's performance. The Partnership Board's decisions aim to link the firm's strategy with its governance and risk appetite, to the pursuit of sustainable profit growth over the longer term for the benefit of all stakeholders.

Our commitment to responsible business and sustainability underlies everything we do as we seek to make an impact that matters for clients, our people, and our communities. The firm’s commitments in this area are overseen by our Partnership Board, which is comprised of the Senior Partner and the Managing Partner (ex officio), and five elected Partners from within the partnership. The Partnership Board is advised by two Non-Executive Advisers who attend all meetings, together with the Finance Director, HR Director and Partnership Secretary.

Responsible business and sustainability are core principles of our Partnership Board. They uphold the firm’s values of fairness, inclusion and social responsibility and act as positive role models for the firm and the wider community.

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