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Community involvement and pro bono activities are an important part of Berwin Leighton Paisner’s practice.  We are also committed to reducing our impact on the environment.

Berwin Leighton Paisner Charities Committee

Each year we elect a charity to which we offer our support. Our charities committee organises a programme of fundraising events and activities, combined with volunteering opportunities and planned visits to some of the charity’s projects in order to foster a sense of personal involvement as well as financial support.

This year we are supporting Havens Hospices.  The charity run two hospices - one for adults and one for children.  Both provide care and support to patients, as well as their families, suffering from life threatening or limiting illnesses.  The focus of Havens Hospices is to add life to days when days cannot be added to life.

Fair Havens is the adult hospice based in Westcliff on Sea, Essex, caring for patients within the local communities of South East Essex.  It has provided 25 years of hospice care for over 18,000 patients and their families. The services they offer to patients and their families include an in-patient unit, a day care centre, community Macmillan nursing, family support and care including bereavement services.  These services are available free of charge whether the patient is at home or in hospital. 72% of their funding comes from voluntary donations and they need to raise £1.9 million each year to continue providing their services.

Little Havens is the children's hospice for the whole of Essex and outer parts of London. The hospice has been established for 10 years, providing care for over 900 children and their families. They offer a range of specialist services, including a 24 hour Help Line, nursing Care, counselling services including bereavement and sibling support, and family care including relief to parents and other family members from the burden of providing continuous care and support as their child dies. Little Havens need to raise approximately £1.8 million annually. 

If you would like further details about Havens Hospices, click here.

Our fundraising year kicks off with our annual sponsored bike ride, which this year will involve 35 people from across the firm cycling from London to Paris over the second May bank holiday weekend. If you would like to sponsor the BLP team, click here to visit their Justgiving page. 

Other regular events include our own in-house on-line auction site, our annual charity raffle and ‘Beat the Board’ quiz, which was hosted by Lawrence Dallaglio and Brian Moore in 2007, and a ‘Stars in Their Eyes’ charity gala evening featuring BLP staff.

In 2007 we raised over £54,000 for Treloar Trust, which provides disabled children and young people with education, training and career opportunities. This year our target is to exceed that total.

Other charities supported in recent years include Friends of the Elderly, The Coram Family, Greater London Fund for the Blind, Gray Laboratory Cancer Research, Whizz-Kidz, Alone in London and The Matthew Trust.

As well as supporting our BLP Charity of the Year, we also hold a fundraising event in support of Comic Relief for Red Nose Day or Sport Relief depending on the year, organise an annual Christmas Gift Appeal for various charities and take part in the annual London Legal Support Trust Sponsored Walk in aid of London's legal advice charities.

Working with the community in east London

We are working with a number of local charitable organisations as part of our Skills for Youth Programme.  The aims of our work with young people are to raise their aspirations through skills enhancement, harnessing the skills of our talented BLP staff, to bring the youth into regular contact with positive adult role models and to provide flexible, creative and very rewarding volunteering opportunities for individuals and teams at BLP.

BLP’s Skills for Youth Programme involves a number of projects. These include:

• Volunteer reading scheme

We are now in the fourth term of our popular volunteer reading scheme working with pupils from Manor Primary School in West Ham, with the support of Newham Education Business Partnership.  The aims of the scheme are to help the children involved to improve their reading skills and general academic achievement, giving them more confidence at school and in the rest of their lives.  Fifty-six BLP staff have volunteered for the scheme since it began in April 2007.  Staff have now also volunteered to help children with their maths skills, going in to school to play specialist numeracy games with pupils showing a real aptitude for maths.

• Make A Difference (MAD) Days

A number of BLP teams have devoted team away days to delivering community projects and events for local charities and community organisations.  Our work with Newham based charity Community Links has included running an IT careers and training day at our offices for young people from various youth programmes, taking a group of youngsters on a day out to London Zoo, giving a makeover to one of Community Links’ community centres and (not forgetting those young at heart rather than in age) hosting a Christmas party at our offices for a group of pensioners.

We also work with national business and enterprise education charity Young Enterprise and teams of BLP volunteers work alongside Young Enterprise staff to deliver business education programmes to schools in the local community.

BLP have a time off for volunteering policy, giving all members of staff one day a year paid time off during regular working hours to volunteer with a community organisation with which the firm is working in partnership or to take part in a fundraising initiative organised by the firm for its charity of the year.

Pro bono clients

We work with a number of leading charities and good causes on a pro bono basis and provide volunteers for a number of on-going pro bono projects. For example we supported the 2012 London Olympic Bid and advise the Museum in Docklands, as well as Camden's "Food for All" Programme, the Ben Gurion University Foundation and the Commission for Racial Equality.

• Helping to protect the rainforests

A recent example of our approach to pro bono activity is our work for Cool Earth. Many of our legal staff, including some of our senior partners, have been working on a pro bono basis for the charity, which was set up by the successful businessman Johan Eliasch and Labour MP Frank Field to secure protection for the world's most threatened rain forests.

Cool Earth helps businesses and individuals invest in rainforest protection, securing land that would otherwise be sold to loggers and ranchers. Investments are put in a local trust. Cool Earth then employs local people to work on sustainable projects and farm the land for its natural produce, helping fund community health and education services.

BLP immediately saw the potential for the charity and enthusiastically committed itself to the project. A firmwide multi-disciplinary team of lawyers  provided free legal advice to help set up the charity and we have continued to be involved in taking forward the charity’s plans, as well as in fundraising.

We also run a number of ongoing pro bono projects in partnership with local charities and community organisations, including:

• Sonali Gardens Legal Advice Service

In partnership with east London based charity St Hilda's East and LawWorks, the operating name of the Solicitors Pro Bono Group, BLP has set up a free weekly drop-in legal advice service at Sonali Gardens Day Centre in Shadwell.  All volunteer advisers are from BLP and volunteer law students from Queen Mary’s help out with general administrative duties.

• Destitute asylum seekers pilot project

We are piloting an immigration law service, helping asylum seekers to prepare fresh asylum claims.  Referrals come from a drop-in centre for destitute asylum seekers set up and run by the New North London Synagogue and the initial cases are for clients from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The BLP volunteers gather evidence from the clients, experts, government agencies and other sources to prepare fresh claim applications.

Reducing our impact on the environment

We are actively looking at ways of reducing our carbon emissions. To lead this work, the firm has established an Environmental Taskforce, which includes partners, directors and others from across the firm. It meets regularly to discuss how we can reduce our impact on the environment and optimise our ability to recycle and reuse waste.

As a starting point for our work in this area, we commissioned a comprehensive carbon footprint audit, conducted by the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management, which looked at the impact of commuting, recycling, business travel and BLP’s premises on the environment.

The results of the audit showed that BLP has one of the lowest known levels of ‘carbon per lawyer’ of any law firm. However, we are determined to further reduce our impact on the environment. For example, the firm is running a staff awareness campaign focused on recycling and saving energy, creating additional recycling facilities and promoting the use of video conferencing. In addition, the firm encourages cycling to work through its Ride2Work scheme, which allows employees to lease bicycles and bicycle safety equipment over the period of a year, and by providing secure cycle storage and showering facilities at our offices.