Essentially, we are a clearinghouse, serving as a conduit between law firms of all sizes—including White & Case—and organizations that need pro bono advice. Our NGO members can request free legal support, and lawyers can volunteer to work on projects that interest them. We bring law firms from all over the world together to collaborate on matters. Our model allows them to take on pro bono work at scale and speed.

TrustLaw is the world’s largest pro bono legal network. We are active in 175 countries and have more than 6,500 members, including 1,000 law firms and about 150,000 lawyers. In the past two years we have delivered more than US$50 million worth of pro bono hours and worked on more than 2,000 high-impact projects. For example, we helped improve access to HIV testing in Africa and successfully worked to outlaw child marriage across the United States.

There are three winners when law firms join forces. First, the pro bono client wins. When you have the world’s top law firms working together on a case, the results will be significantly stronger. Second, the lawyers themselves win, benefiting from the mentorship opportunities that arise when people of different seniority levels across multiple law firms have the chance to work together. The third winner is the pro bono ecosystem itself because lawyers working in multiple jurisdictions bring different nuances to the table. When questions require a cross-jurisdictional approach, legal teams can consider how an issue has been addressed elsewhere. The idea is to compare best practices, giving good examples of what’s worked in different jurisdictions. If you’re advocating to change a particular issue, you can then demonstrate to local policy makers that the issue is being taken seriously in other jurisdictions—so much so that there are already best practices that can be adopted.

In the past we had done a lot of work on modern slavery. The Thomson Reuters Foundation trained journalists to raise awareness of the issue, and multiple law firms completed legal research on the issue through TrustLaw. Then we realized that the scourge of modern slavery was just the tip of the iceberg. It is rooted in inequality so we wanted to look at what drives inequality to address it at a systemic level. That led us automatically to the S in ESG, which includes the issue of forced labor, and other themes such as diversity and inclusion and ensuring a just energy transition—one that enables us to switch to a greener economy without leaving people behind. All these issues have become increasingly important to investors and companies.

Investors cite certain challenges and misconceptions when it comes to adopting ESG indicators, in particular the S indicator. Last year TrustLaw worked with White & Case and others to produce a white paper that addressed some of these limiting myths. To give just one example, there is a false perception that social performance is less financially material than environmental performance. But companies that score low on S indicators—for example, because of poor labor practices or human rights abuses within their supply chains—can damage their reputations, which can impact share price.

For the first time companies are trying to speak the same language when they look at the social, environmental and governance impact of their operations. These conversations are moving up the boardroom agenda as investors recognize that companies with strong ESG credentials offer less risk and perform better. There is an opportunity for law firms to be well-equipped to advise their clients who will, in turn, need that advice because legislation, in addition to the investment community, is moving in that direction.