How has Mills & Reeve’s brand positioning and identity been shaped by the rising importance of ESG, and how do you ensure that your sustainability efforts aren’t just viewed as ‘greenwashing’?

When it comes to ESG, it’s championed from the top down. This has been particularly instrumental while developing our new 2030 strategic plan. We were keen to avoid ESG simply being viewed as a separate strand of that strategy – instead being positioned firmly at the heart of it. We were able to achieve this by building ESG into our purpose and vision, through which our ESG strategies are core to how we deliver on our purpose. Building ESG into our strategic plan has also given us a great opportunity to revisit our firm values to ensure they too reflect our approach to building a more responsible business.

Taking a strategic approach to ESG and measuring well, gives us the evidence to create meaningful and authentic reports and communications which in turn avoids greenwashing and greenhushing. We’ve made our net zero commitments, set our targets and we promote environmental sustainability in all aspects of our operations. We’ll be holding ourselves accountable to these. To support our people and clients, we’re embedding ESG even deeper into the organisation. We’ve got a great team incorporating sustainability experts, our diversity, inclusion and wellbeing team and wider ESG specialists both within business services and within our legal teams to encourage good governance.

We’ve also been building out our distinctive “Achieve more. Together.” strapline into a more defined purpose statement. The framework we’ve built, “achieving more for you, your business (or organisation), and the wider world”, allows us to bring issues like wellbeing and ESG into the conversation.

Case study: We’ve recently teamed up with longstanding client Albanwise Environment to restore a difficult to cultivate piece of farmland that suffers with flooding and peat degradation during drought. Working with Albanwise Environment in the first of its kind project, environmental DNA (eDNA) specialists NatureMetrics have taken peatland soil and water samples from the site in Norfolk to see what species could thrive in the area and where the land needs to improve. The eDNA will also be compared to samples taken from existing wetland sites nearby. This will give clues to the sort of habitats and landscapes that could develop at the site in 20-30 years’ time.

Eventually we’re looking to use carbon credits from the wetland restoration to offset our own emissions and achieve our emissions reduction targets. We believe this project sets us apart from other firms who tend to look to the national and international voluntary carbon markets for offsetting. It’s also more interesting, it becomes a story that we can take people on a journey with over the next 5-10 years. We’ve also had advice from our in-house ESG law team about avoiding making greenwashing claims and being able to back up what we say with facts

How have clients (corporates and private clients) responded to the firm’s sustainability efforts? Have you noticed a shift in brand perception or loyalty among clients as a result of your ESG initiatives?

ESG initiatives have given us a great platform to engage with clients in a very different way. It’s also helped us to stand out, which is not easy in a highly competitive marketplace where it has become increasingly difficult for firms to distinguish their offering.

For example, earlier this year we delivered ‘ESG Ignite’ a five-part thought leadership series based on an extensive client listening programme with senior business leaders from across a diverse range of sectors. We valued the openness from clients on their ESG challenges and opportunities. The campaign provided a strong platform for different organisations to showcase their own stories which were featured throughout the series. Response to the campaign has been fantastic, possibly one of the strongest engagements we’ve seen from a thought leadership campaign – resulting in new work and new clients, through to opportunities to authentically collaborate and partner with clients’ business networks.

What have been the biggest challenges and opportunities you’ve faced in integrating sustainability into the brand, both from an operational and communication standpoint?

One of the biggest challenges has been helping people to understand what ESG is, where it fits in the business and what each of us can do, irrespective of our role, to achieve our ESG goals. This is as much about engaging hearts and minds, to ultimately encourage different behaviours. We are currently looking at implementing a firmwide ESG learning and training platform to help colleagues to ask the right questions and keep them engaged without overwhelming them. For a start, we’ve introduced bits of compulsory training, for instance, on carbon literacy, just to make people think about the decisions they make individually in the office and when they go home at night.

We also use our well-established employee networks across the business which represent different voices across our communities. These networks provide a fantastic opportunity to run workshops based on colleagues’ lived experiences and the issues they face, to try and improve understanding and foster inclusivity and sustainability within Mills & Reeve.

We’re using channels such as videos, podcasts, Instagram and TikTok to reach people where they are. We’re in our second year of producing our sustainability report, which has been well received both internally and externally.

We have a record at Mills & Reeve of going above and beyond statutory reporting requirements. For example, over the years we’ve expanded our gender pay gap reporting into an annual Pay Gap Report, sharing other pay gap statistics, including ethnicity and disability.

From an overall brand perspective, there can be this tension between business growth and then how this combines with the responsible side of the business, including for example sustainability targets. Our view is that these are not mutually exclusive, they all come together to push us forward.

How is the focus on sustainability reflected in daily practices and how has this influenced the internal culture at Mills & Reeve?

The starting point for Mills & Reeve was getting buy-in from the top. ESG will never work in an organisation unless senior leadership buy into it. Both our senior and managing partners are Board leads on several environmental and social sustainability programmes, which ensures that they are prioritised across the business. In addition, the ESG team spends a lot of time engaging with colleagues – whether that’s partners and lawyers about the pressures their clients are facing, talking to individuals from different employee groups and communities about their life experiences, or staff more broadly about the firm’s responsible business agenda and how they can help us to achieve our ESG goals.

We recently partnered with WildHearts on a talent leadership development programme. Thirty people across the business were tasked with using their entrepreneurial skills to develop a business idea that would address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in line with Mills & Reeve’s responsible business goals. The programme resulted in six fantastic ideas being pitched – from managing our food waste, implementing mental wellbeing, through to improving volunteering across the firm. As well as professional skills development, all delegates really valued being able to get involved in projects that captured their passions and interests, in a way they wouldn’t normally get an opportunity to do so.

Other ways we are embedding ESG within the business includes establishing a Sustainability Steering Group and a firmwide network of sustainability activists to help us deliver our ambitious ‘planet’ goals. In addition, we are stepping up the firm’s approach to driving social value through impactful community projects. This includes promoting volunteering across the business. We want to make it easy for staff to finds lots of different volunteering opportunities, across lots of different causes, in different areas of the UK, which need a variety of different skill sets.

How do you see ESG reporting evolving in the future? Do you expect to see a shift from ESG reporting (which is based on a risk management framework) to an impact led approach which is more closely tied to corporate purpose?

Pressure to ‘do the right thing’ is building. Our clients, colleagues, future talent and community partners (to name just a few groups) are increasingly demanding transparency on business activities. They want to know what positive contributions we are making to social and environmental goals. This goes far beyond the traditional defensive, risk-oriented approach to ESG reporting. This approach certainly chimes with our own recent feedback from clients where over two-thirds of senior leaders we spoke to said that their organisation’s focus on ESG is not due to regulatory pressure, but due to internal and external people pressure.

Clients too are a driving force in ESG reporting. As part of clients’ supply chains, law firms are being increasingly interrogated as part of their own ESG reporting requirements. In addition, advised emissions (emission created by client work) may well be on the horizon with the potential to make it increasingly difficult for law firms to separate their efforts to more sustainable practices from those of their clients.

In the meantime, we will continue to see a rising trend towards voluntary reporting. Like many firms, Mills & Reeve are already adopting globally recognised standards such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to showcase their achievements and report annually on progress. And while we are required by the Government to publish our pay gap report online, we want to go beyond just what’s required. So, we also include our partner, ethnicity and disability pay gaps too.