Community
Supporting our local communities
Our community strategy focuses on three core pillars – social mobility and education, poverty and environment.
Our work in this space includes financial investment via the Eversheds Sutherland (International) Charitable Trust, volunteering, and gifts in kind to support our global, national and local charity partners. In FY 2023/2024, our people gave over 11,000 hours of their time for community activity.
Eversheds Sutherland (International) Charitable Trust
Over the past year, the Eversheds Sutherland (International) Charitable Trust has provided funding of £652,731 to over 100 charities including our firmwide partners such as the International Rescue Committee and Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, those supported by individual offices, as well as donating to global emergency appeals. The Trust also provides matched funding for internal teams and individuals fundraising for a specific cause.
Supporting the International Rescue Committee
On World Refugee Day 2024, we marked the first anniversary of our global partnership with the International Rescue Committee ('IRC'). Founded in 1933, the IRC’s mission is to ‘help people affected by humanitarian crises to survive, recover and gain control over their future.’ We provide the IRC with financial and pro bono support to help ensure its focus can remain on supporting those most in need across the 40+ countries where the IRC works with its local partners. We are pleased to report that in the first year of our global partnership, we recorded over 1,200 hours on more than 40 different pro bono matters for the IRC involving colleagues from across the globe and multiple jurisdictions. Examples of some of the projects we have supported pro bono during the first year of our partnership include:
- Preparing a Global Data Privacy Policy
- Advising on AI provisions in various commercial agreements, including in relation to an AI-driven software subscription that would allow the IRC’s HR team to generate learning content
- Supporting the IRC with the legal and commercial framework around its flagship Signpost programme, which gives those displaced by humanitarian crises access to quick and secure support and advice
- Advising on real estate projects across the IRC’s US offices
- Providing employment law advice and training in a number of jurisdictions, and free places on our external International Employment Law courses for the IRC’s HR and legal teams
- Participating in legal research projects to support the IRC’s US RAI Immigration Programme
- Ensured compliance with new UK procurement regulations and updated a suite of documents issued to UK programming partners
“No matter how big or small the project, the dedication, expertise, and commitment by the team of attorneys at Eversheds Sutherland supporting the IRC across various matters has been fully appreciated and recognised throughout the organisation. This unwavering support has ensured that we are utilising our resources to support our programmes, both in the US and around the globe, and the clients we serve, whether caught in the midst of a conflict or disaster, displaced or being resettled into new homes.” Helene Herold, IRC Deputy General Counsel
“In Europe, the firm’s expert advice helps us navigate the complex regulatory environment we work in, which helps protect IRC, our staff and ultimately our clients. The breadth of expertise across many of the jurisdictions in which we work allows us to gain comprehensive advice for the breadth of our activities – from data protection in the EU, employment law in the UK, commercial contracts in Germany to corporate governance in Belgium.” Rachel French, IRC Associate General Counsel, Europe
“I have provided intellectual property advice to IRC during the first year of our partnership. This partnership is not just about giving back; it’s about building a better world and making a lasting impact through our combined forces.” Kristina Kober, Senior Associate, Munich
“We are supporting IRC on its global financial crime framework, which aims to protect their important work across the world and ensure that it is not compromised by financial crime. This is an example of how we can support IRC’s incredible efforts to deliver lasting impact when responding to the world’s worst humanitarian crises.” Jess Hambly, Senior Associate, London
“We’ve been supporting IRC on its data sharing work internationally, to help facilitate local, community-led crisis management supporting vulnerable individuals across the world when they need it most. We should all take time to appreciate and support the amazing work the IRC does in what are often life-changing circumstances and, ultimately, how important it is for all of us to use the skills we have to contribute positively to our local and global communities.” Dave Hughes, Partner, Cambridge
Social mobility and education
Our aim is to offer support across a range of age groups for less advantaged children and young people to help them broaden their horizons and access opportunities, with a focus on education around careers in the legal profession. Some of our key initiatives include:
Poverty
Our aim is to help alleviate poverty through targeted intervention and financial support. Some of our key initiatives include:
Magic Breakfast
Since 2021, we have partnered with Magic Breakfast, a charity working to support schools with a high percentage of students who are eligible for free school meals. Their aim is to ensure no child is too hungry to learn. We collaborate to provide nutritious breakfasts and ongoing assistance to four schools, located near one of our UK offices:
- Birmingham
- London
- Manchester
- Nottingham
Our people have dedicated over 190 hours in the past year to supporting Magic Breakfast. They volunteer at breakfast clubs, assist with meal service, and support students in their educational development, including developing reading and conversational skills.
Weekly commitment in Nottingham
At our partner school in Nottingham, we have two groups of volunteers which alternate on a weekly basis, ensuring consistent support. Each group helps with activities such as serving food, playing games, preparing breakfast, and tidying up.
Volunteer experience
“It is a really positive way to start my day and the whole experience is really rewarding. The staff appreciate our support in preparing breakfasts and serving the children as they are really understaffed and only have a short window of time to get everything done. The children love playing board games with us, which is highly entertaining! It’s great to be able to support such a valuable scheme to ensure that the children are set up for the day at school.”
Lilith Rooney, Paralegal, Nottingham
“Magic Breakfast is a fantastic volunteering opportunity that has a direct positive impact on our local community in Nottingham. Our time and commitment is strongly valued by the pupils and teaching staff.”
Alistair Hunt, Paralegal, Nottingham
Our support has enabled Magic Breakfast to deliver over 300,000 healthy breakfasts for children. Looking ahead, we plan to expand this partnership to work with a school near each of our UK offices, furthering our commitment to ensuring no child starts their day hungry.
Volunteering for the environment
Our aim is to develop partnerships to aid our commitment to climate action, utilising opportunities to engage our clients, our people and our communities. Our partnerships build on our environmental sustainability initiatives to improve our environmental performance and make a positive contribution to the conservation of our planet. Key partnerships include:
Pro bono legal support
As a participant in the UN Global Compact, we are committed to advancing Sustainable Development Goal 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions and we recognise our ability to improve access to justice through an impactful pro bono legal advice programme. We provide free legal advice and support to individuals in need, charities and not-for-profit organisations, both through our established pro bono projects and relationships and via new initiatives and partnerships established to meet emerging legal need.
We encourage all our lawyers to be involved in pro bono work, allowing them to develop key skills, broaden their networks and enhance wellbeing while helping our communities to thrive. From May 2023 to April 2024, colleagues across the business committed over 16,000 hours to pro bono legal work. We also provide opportunities for business service professionals to work on our pro bono initiatives. We support our colleagues’ wellbeing by providing bespoke training on representing vulnerable clients and secondary trauma, and specialist individual counselling is available to our volunteers should they wish to access that support.
Protecting the rights of undocumented children
In the UK, we work with Kids In Need of Defense UK ('KIND UK'), helping undocumented children to make applications for formal British citizenship. We have over 50 UK colleagues participating in this work and have a 100% success rate where decisions have been made. We will soon be launching a collaboration with two of our key commercial clients on this project. In France, we are members of L’Alliance des Avocats pour les Droits de l’Homme ('AADH'). As part of AADH’s Enfance Précarité Zéro programme, we support NGOs representing families of undocumented children and unaccompanied migrant children to gather evidence and make applications for French citizenship, asylum and/or residence permits. We also provide support in relation to navigating the processes involved in integration of these children into French society.
Welfare and disability
In the UK, we work in conjunction with local law centres and charities to support individuals navigating the complex welfare and disability benefits application process, and to mount appeals where they believe their claims for benefits have been incorrectly assessed or refused. Our pro bono volunteers help to prepare and submit applications and collate supporting evidence. We also help to present appeals, and we have maintained a 100% success rate in appeal cases to date. In Germany, our lawyers provide ongoing pro bono legal support to long-standing client Special Olympics Deutschland ('SOD'), the world's largest sports movement for people with multiple disabilities. In France, through our membership of the Association Franck Joffo, we provide free legal advice to healthcare staff of the Assitance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris ('AP-HP') on a range of issues. AP-HP is the largest teaching hospital in Europe, the largest employer in Paris and provides a 24 hour public health service for all.
Racial and social justice
Over 100 of our partners and lawyers around the world volunteer their time and skills to assist Amicus in its pursuit of combating the death penalty in the US. Working with the Florida Center for Capital Representation ('FCCR'), we monitor pre-trial death penalty cases in the state of Florida to identify patterns in the charging and conviction processes, with a particular focus on cases where race may have influenced decision making or outcomes. In the UK, we partner with charity United Legal Access to help individuals making claims for compensation under the Windrush Compensation Scheme. Our volunteers assist these applicants to compile relevant evidence and to complete the complex application process so they can access compensation they are rightfully entitled to, as well as dealing with appeals against negative decisions or low awards. We offer pro bono support to the Youth Justice Legal Centre ('YJLC') and its Youth Criminal Justice Helpline service. Our volunteers triage new enquiries, research enquiries and prepare advice and draft legal updates on youth justice issues for YJLC’s website and newsletters.
Supporting survivors of domestic abuse
Since 2022, we have been part of the Domestic Abuse Response Alliance ('DARA'), an alliance of ten leading UK law firms, in partnership with UK charity LawWorks. Supported by specialists in family law, our volunteers apply for protective injunctions on behalf of domestic abuse survivors who do not qualify for legal aid against their abusers. We provide vulnerable clients with legal support from the beginning to the end of court proceedings, guiding them through the traumatic process of confronting their abusers in court. We have maintained a 100% success rate in applications made to date.
Protecting the rights of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants
The firm is a proud signatory of the multi-stakeholder Global Refugee Forum Legal Community Pledge, launched at the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva in December 2023. The Pledge seeks to unite the legal community and allies around a shared goal of working with and for refugees and other forcibly displaced people, harnessing the power of the law to advance their access to rights, justice and lasting solutions to their displacement. Being part of the Pledge community will help us to maximise the impact of the work we do in this area, while ensuring that the voices of refugees and displaced persons are placed front and centre of that work. Since October 2021, lawyers from across our European offices have been working on the Rule 39 Initiative, a collaboration between eight international law firms and international human rights expert, Daria Sartori, that provide life-altering legal support to displaced persons across Europe. Rule 39 of the Rules of the European Court of Human Rights ('ECtHR') allows applicants to seek interim relief in cases of imminent risk of irreparable damage to human rights. Rule 39 requests can typically be used to stop collective pushbacks of asylum seekers, ensure dignified reception conditions and the provision of food and water to refugees and asylum seekers stuck at or between borders. We are working with the Global Strategic Litigation Council for Refugee Rights and Earth Refuge on the development of a new Climate Displacement Case Database. The database will hold case summaries of migration and asylum cases, globally, where a climate event has played a part in a person’s displacement. Pro bono lawyers across our international offices review reported cases with a climate element across a range of jurisdictions and prepare case summaries for inclusion in the database. The database will be used by NGOs and strategic litigators as a tool for informed decision making, effective strategy development and better advocacy in the area of law and policy relating to climate refugees. In Hong Kong, we provide pro bono support for and in collaboration with two non-profit organisations that support the 300,000+ migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong; PathFinders and HELP for Domestic Workers. Our work includes representing individuals in wrongful termination/unfair treatment cases, advising on legal rights/protections available and delivering workshops on negotiation skills and mediation for the organisations’ staff and community leaders. PathFinders’ 2023 Impact Report featured the firm as its most strategic partner during 2023 and successfully nominated us for a Caring Company Award under the Caring Company Scheme, organised by the Hong Kong Council of Social Service.
Women’s Legal Protection Project
An initiative set up by colleagues in our UAE offices, the Women's Legal Protection Project is dedicated to supporting vulnerable women facing challenging situations in the region. We support women subjected to unlawful working conditions and threats of false absconding charges. Our efforts focus on helping these women connect with government authorities, lawfully change their employment status, rectify their immigration status and claim unpaid wages and other dues from their employers.
Support for Ukraine
The Ukraine Advice Project ('UAP') is an online service for those displaced by war in Ukraine. Established in March 2022 by a team of immigration specialists in response to the conflict, the project is now run as a collaborative pro bono project by Eversheds Sutherland alongside three other law firms. The UAP provides displaced individuals with reliable information about UK visa/immigration routes, and signposts useful resources to help navigate life in the UK. Through online chat exchanges, more than 6,000 Ukrainians have been able to obtain vital information and support quickly and securely while on the move, and continue to do so.
Representing members of the Afghan judiciary
Since late 2021, we have represented members of the Afghan judiciary in relation to their applications under the bespoke UK immigration schemes put in place in response to the Taliban seizing control in Afghanistan. Our clients include Supreme Court judges, prosecutors and women’s rights activists, a number of whom remain in hiding in Afghanistan.
Over 50 volunteers in the UK have worked to prepare immigration applications and to compile detailed witness evidence in support and judicial review proceedings in the High Court are continuing in a number of these cases. Colleagues in Germany, France, Sweden and the US have provided support on non-UK resettlement options for our clients. We work with the broader UK legal community to provide support to those members of the Afghan judiciary who have arrived in the UK and who wish to rebuild their careers, and we are proud to have an Afghan national judge completing an apprenticeship with the firm. In January 2024, we developed and launched a project in collaboration with German non-profit Max Planck Foundation ('MPF') to collate evidence and prepare applications for resettlement to Germany under a bespoke scheme for at-risk Afghan nationals. The individuals we assist are still in Afghanistan, at serious risk of harm from the Taliban as a result of their previous work or public profile. Our colleagues in Germany and the UK work with MPF to gather the detailed evidence required to be able to submit applications on behalf of main applicants and their family members, and prepare the application documents ready for submission. We are part of a collaboration of 14 UK-based law firms working with NGOs Safe Passage and Refugee Legal Support, set up to provide end-to-end casework support and information services to Afghan national refugees regarding resettlement and family reunion applications in the UK.
Awards and recognition for our pro bono work
2023
- Winner, LexisNexis Awards, Pro Bono Project of the Year 2023 (Ukraine Advice Project)
- Winner, The Lawyer Awards, Pro Bono Initiative of the Year 2023 (Domestic Abuse Response Alliance)
- Winner, PILnet, Local Impact Award 2023 (Domestic Abuse Response Alliance)
- Winner, PILnet, Global Partnership Award 2023 (Rule 39 Initiative)
- Winner, LawWorks Pro Bono Awards 2023, Best International Pro Bono Award (Rule 39 Initiative)
- Highly Commended, The Lawyer Awards 2023, Pro Bono Initiative of the Year (Afghan Pro Bono Initiative)
- Highly Commended, LawWorks Pro Bono Awards 2023, Most Effective Pro Bono Partnership (KIND UK)
- Shortlisted, FT Innovative Awards Europe 2023, Responsible Business Category (Rule 39 Initiative)
- Shortlisted, FT Innovative Awards Europe 2023, Responsible Business Category (Afghan Pro Bono Initiative)
- Shortlisted, The Lawyer European Awards 2023, Best Pro Bono Initiative (Rule 39 Initiative)
- Shortlisted, The British Legal Awards 2023, Outstanding Social Impact Award (Rule 39 Initiative)
- Shortlisted, The British Legal Awards 2023, Outstanding Social Impact Award (Afghan Pro Bono Initiative)
- Shortlisted, The British Legal Awards 2023, Outstanding Social Impact Award (KIND UK)
- Shortlisted, LawWorks Pro Bono Awards 2023, Most Effective Pro Bono Partnership (Domestic Abuse Response Alliance)
- Shortlisted, LawWorks Pro Bono Awards 2023, Best New Pro Bono Activity (UCL/PIP Project)
- Hong Kong Pro Bono and Community Service Awards 2023, Gabrielle Honey and Steven Yuen, Silver Awards; Karen Fan, Bronze Award
2024
- Winner, Legal 500 ESG UK Awards 2024 (ESG Firm of the Year)
- Shortlisted, Legal 500 UK ESG Awards 2024, Pro Bono Initiative of the Year (Domestic Abuse Response Alliance)
- Shortlisted, Legal 500 UK ESG Awards 2024, Pro Bono Initiative of the Year (Rule 39 Initiative)
- Over 70 lawyers from our offices in England and Wales were included on the inaugural Pro Bono Recognition List, which recognises lawyers who gave 25 hours or more pro bono legal assistance during the 2023 calendar year. The initiative is supported by the Law Society, the Bar Council and overseen by the Attorney General’s Pro Bono Committee.
Our contacts
For any questions surrounding this report please contact:
Judith Green Chief Strategy and Communications Officer T: +44 20 7919 0545 judithgreen@eversheds-sutherland.com
Ikramul Choudhury Senior Manager - Responsible Business T: +44 20 7919 4513 ikramulchoudhury@eversheds-sutherland.com
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