Introduction

Our approach to sustainable business is holistic, strategic and people-centric. We want to ensure that environmental stewardship, community investment and ethical governance remain at the forefront of our day-to-day operations and professional identity. Constant progress is a key part of our purpose and culture, and we strive to think ahead with ideas and initiatives that make better experiences possible.

Being a sustainable and responsible business plays an important role in our strategy as a firm, and while it has been embedded in the fabric of our firm for over a hundred years, we endeavour to increase our impact and progress across the various strands of our sustainable business programme.

In September 2024, we were proud to receive external recognition of our ongoing commitment when we were awarded the Outstanding Achievement in Sustainable Business Impact award at the Chamber’s Ireland Sustainable Business Impact Awards.

This is the fifth year of publishing our impact across the four internationally recognised core dimensions of a sustainable business programme: Environment, Workplace, Community and Marketplace.

Voluntarily reporting across these key areas of our business each year provides us with an opportunity to look not only at the activities and impact where things are working well, but also to examine those areas which need more focus and attention. We want to benchmark our activities against our peers and the wider business community to ensure that we continue to strive to be best in class when it comes to embedding sustainability in our firm. We were pleased to re-engage with Ecovadis this year, the globally recognised sustainability ratings provider, and to begin our partnership with Lamp House, the insights specialist for the legal sector. Both organisations use an external data-driven assessment of the impacts of our efforts, which provides a means to compare both our absolute and relative performance.

Over the past year, much of our focus has been on our environmental activities as we have updated our GHG/CO2 emissions targets and actions for the period 2026 to 2030. To align with the CSRD reporting regime, our base year for reporting data and emissions progress has been rebased to Financial Year 2019 (as opposed to the calendar year 2019) for consistency in reporting the GHG reductions achieved. We had previously worked with the Science Based Targets Initiative regarding our GHG reduction targets for 2021 to 2025. While we did achieve some of the intended reductions and made substantial progress with others (see the Environment section of this report for details), our Scope 3 emissions and in particular business travel, have proved to be a significant challenge. As a result, we are introducing CO2 travel impact dashboards across the firm to highlight the impact of travel plans and to assist staff in managing GHG travel emissions towards our restated 50% GHG reduction ambition by 2030. Our revised carbon reduction ambition statement has once again been submitted to the Science Based Target Initiative. We are also preparing to provide training to better educate and involve our people in initiatives and programmes that help us collectively reach our goal of maximising sustainability in our day-to-day business.

We are proud of our work in the community as we continue to partner with wonderful charities and volunteer organisations that do incredible work in their respective areas. Our significant commitment to pro bono legal work also continues as we strive for continuing excellence, progress and innovation in our pro bono work as in everything else that we do.

This report demonstrates our activities for our financial year 2024/25. We hope it provides a showcase of new developments and an update on many of our longer-standing activities over the past year. We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the dedication of our people and the numerous organisations that we engage with to ensure that we collectively contribute to drive change for a more sustainable future for everyone. We are also for the first time publishing target metrics for the year’s performance in a number of areas (alongside the GHG reduction aims), such as volunteering hours, our Zambia project and other fundraising activities, as well as pro bono hours and participation. We believe that having targets is important in understanding and monitoring both performance and the impact of our contribution.

On the governance side, we are tracking the CSRD regime, and the firm has formed a CSRD Working Group to oversee the collation and collection of the requisite underlying data and disclosure information. While the CSRD regime does not apply to Arthur Cox, we recognise that it will be important for many of our clients. Our intention will be to use this Sustainable Business Impact Report to provide information on a number of aspects of the CSRD regime. From next year, we intend to include links to more detailed disclosures.

Finally, we are fortunate to work in a firm where a lot of people are willing to engage in the small but important extra-curricular efforts that make an important difference to our impact in this area. Particular mention must be made of the invaluable contribution made by Jean Maxwell, Charlotte Nolan-Browne, the executive team for Sustainable Business, and Carolann Minnock our Pro Bono Of Counsel, in corralling and co-ordinating all that energy and effort into the focussed and impactful outcomes highlighted in this report.