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Overview2010-20182019-20212022-2023Our ESG AssessmentWhat's nextInsightsKey
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ESG AT BLG: LESSONS LEARNED FROM INSIDE THE ESG JOURNEY AT CANADA’S LAW FIRM

BLG routinely advises clients on ESG risks and opportunities. To fully support
others on ESG, we wanted to embed it in our internal culture and operations as
well. This article documents our ESG journey and shares our steps, successes and
lessons learned, with the goal of helping other professional services firms
better serve their people, clients, communities and the planet.


ESG’S EARLY DAYS


“Back then we didn’t call it ESG. We just called it good business.”

In the early days, ESG was a Wild West of voluntary standards and inconsistent
definitions, known by name to only a few industry insiders. At BLG, we were
taking important steps to conduct our business responsibly and contribute to our
communities, but we didn’t use the phrase environmental, social and governance.
During this time, we became the first law firm in Canada to receive our ISO
certification for information security, the first law firm in Canada to have a
full-time role dedicated to diversity and inclusion and continued our tradition
of award-winning pro bono work.


2010-2018 HIGHLIGHTS




ESG ON THE CANADIAN CORPORATE AGENDA


“Clients began asking us what we were doing for ESG.”

Fast forward to 2019, and a dedicated group of BLG lawyers were having regular,
frank conversations with clients about the ESG risks and opportunities in
several areas, particularly investment management and M&A.

With climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the
finding of more than 200 unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian
Residential School mobilizing people across the globe, BLG continued to act. We
established a mandatory anti-racism training program, founded an event for
LGBTQ+ law students, signed the BlackNorth pledge and initiated a robust
supplier ESG screening program. We performed a carbon baseline assessment—using
2019 data to avoid the anomaly of the pandemic skewing our data—in a format that
we could update annually to track progress.

At the same time, some of our clients were considering ESG factors in their
vendor selection and began asking us for evidence of our commitment to action,
initially focusing on diversity, equity, inclusion and other “social” efforts
and later asking about our carbon reduction work. In 2021, we started producing
quarterly community involvement and wellness reports for client requests.


2019-2021 HIGHLIGHTS




COMPLIANCE AND CHANGE


“A baseline assessment is a benchmark to gauge progress.”

By the end of 2023, ESG had become a more mature framework with increasingly
stringent legal requirements, standardized terminology and greater scope.
Businesses were paying closer attention to risks in their supply chains, gaps in
the data they were collecting and inconsistencies in reports produced for
different stakeholders. Some organizations were using ESG assessments to make
meaningful changes in business as usual. Others still saw ESG as little more
than a compliance exercise.

At BLG, 2022 and 2023 saw us formalize our ESG commitment in several ways. The
most important was our first ESG assessment, completed with the help of Hive
Advisory Inc. You can learn more about the process below. But it wasn’t all we
did; there were many other important ESG milestones at BLG in 2022-2023:


2022-2023 HIGHLIGHTS




OUR FIRST ESG ASSESSMENT

"I commend the team at BLG for their commitment and openness to the discussions
when the hard questions prompt reflection...BLG wholeheartedly cares.”

- Stefan Piech, CEO and managing partner, Hive Advisory Inc.

ESG baseline assessment timeline



IDENTIFYING MATERIAL RISK CATEGORIES

We started our ESG assessment at a time when increased political engagement,
particularly in the U.S., meant activists were holding companies legally
accountable for ESG claims while other influential stakeholders, including
investors, penalized companies for being “too woke.” In the context of such
contradictions, we wanted to be strategic and deliberate in our approach.
Balance was our guiding principle.

The ESG steering committee began the assessment process by identifying material
risk categories relevant to a law firm using the Sustainalytics framework. Then
Hive Advisory helped us identify key performance indicators to measure our
progress to date.

Given our industry, it was clear that governance—encompassing board composition,
disclosure, compliance, professional integrity, ethics, and all things
technology—was most important, with almost half of our KPIs falling into this
category. One-third of our KPIs were considered social, focusing on people
management, community relations and pro bono work. Just under one-fifth were
classified as environmental—including resource use and the disclosure, reporting
and reduction of Scope 1 (direct) and Scope 2 (indirect) greenhouse gas
emissions.






MAKING THE GRADE

Once we settled on metrics, Hive Advisory measured our performance. They used
best practices in ESG standards, including those from the Global Reporting
Initiative, Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, Corporate Knights Best 50
Methodology, and Climate Disclosure Standard Board, as well as comparative
research to similar-sized professional services organizations.

The result was an 89-page ESG baseline report that began with an overall
maturity score and ended with a detailed examination of 120 KPIs in seven core
areas of BLG’s operations.

“It’s hard to show your data to a third party and open yourself to critique,”
says Hive Advisory’s CEO and managing partner, Stefan Piech. “We treated BLG
like a public company—which is where we do the majority of our ESG and related
work—and I commend the team at BLG for their commitment and openness to the
discussions when the hard questions prompt reflection. There’s something to be
said for those who can criticize themselves and improve. BLG wholeheartedly
cares.”


LESSONS LEARNED

Our first ESG assessment, like all things done for the first time, was a
learning experience. Here are six tips for other professional services firms
doing an ESG assessment, taken from what went well for us and what we’d do
differently next time.

#1 Do your homework. 
Our consultant commended us for our rigorous work to identify the areas of
material risk for a law firm; they plan to replicate this holistic approach in
future engagements with professional services firms. Looking at publications
from Sustainalytics, doing the materiality analysis and identifying our ESG
categories before the assessment began created momentum before the consultants
were involved and saved us time.

#2 Don’t forget ops.
Initially almost all the members of our ESG steering committee were partners of
the firm, a decision that helped give the initiative credibility and strong
sponsorship—two things our consultant agrees are critical to success. To create
clear lines of communication, fill information gaps and ensure ESG was on their
agenda, we quickly expanded the group to include representatives from the
business side of the firm with responsibilities in each of the areas we were
discussing.

#3 More isn’t always better.
We put in considerable effort to narrow the KPIs for each material risk category
to only those that had the greatest relevance to our business. Having been
through the process, we plan to reduce them further to truly focus on indicators
that matter to a law firm and its clients.

#4 Collect data before the assessment begins.
Our carbon baseline assessment, conducted in 2022, helped us do much better on
our greenhouse gas emission KPIs than if we hadn’t established a methodology for
measurement and gathered data ahead of time. We asked our consultant to develop
a tool we can use repeatedly in-house, an approach we’d also recommend to other
firms doing this work.

#5 Be prepared for a deep data dive.
Because it was the first time we’d asked many of the questions posed by the
assessment, data gathering was often onerous. We will streamline and systematize
the process so decision-makers have the information they need to manage our risk
factors without overburdening our staff.

#6 Think about your baseline assessment from the perspective of ROI.
Private companies that aren’t subject to mandatory ESG reporting may have
difficulty convincing decision-makers that an assessment is important. Pitch the
assessment as an investment that will demonstrate your organization’s strengths
and a willingness to improve. For example, a company with proof of a strong
governance framework, top-notch privacy and security and exemplary community
relations will have an edge when it submits a proposal, enters discussions with
a stakeholder group or engages in M&A discussions. An organization that takes an
ESG assessment seriously will be at an advantage when it comes to recruitment
and retention.

 


WHAT’S NEXT FOR ESG

“ESG is never a destination. It’s an opportunity to invest and improve over the
long term.”

For Canadian and international businesses, we are anticipating a few things for
ESG this year.

Canada’s modern slavery legislation will prompt businesses to look more closely
at their supply chains. Companies will play catch-up with the privacy, bias,
workforce transformation and intellectual property challenges raised by AI. If
we have another year of climate-related environmental disasters and heat waves,
this will put pressure on employers and insurance companies to act. Emboldened
unions may address ESG issues with direct worker impact at the negotiating
table. We’ll see more assets allocated to ESG funds. And more organizations may
return to using the word “sustainability” in place of or alongside the more
controversial “ESG.”

At BLG, we’ll use our baseline assessment to establish priorities, identify
targets, develop actions plans and allocate budgets for future improvements.
With our 2022 carbon baseline assessment in place as a methodology and reporting
structure, our priority for 2024 is establishing targets and putting governance
in place to ensure we’re making progress on the ‘E’ category. Our operational
teams will take on primary responsibility for our ESG work from BLG’s partners.
We will fill some data gaps, for example, by collecting commuting data from our
own people instead of relying on population data from StatsCan.

In the long term, it’s important to us to establish how we can effectively
compare our progress to our peers. We envision working together as an industry
to benchmark metrics like diversity and carbon emissions in the same way as we
benchmark salary and recruitment statistics.

This is a journey shared by many, with opportunities to learn from, elevate and
challenge each other along the way.

If you’d like to know more about BLG’s ESG work, have questions about our
assessment or are interested in joining a benchmarking initiative for
professional services organizations, feel free to reach out to John Vellone or
any of the key contacts below.


INSIGHTS

 * Findings and tips from Canada’s first survey of fund managers on ESG PODCAST

 * Modern slavery and supply chain transparency in Canada: How to report ARTICLE

 * Lucky 7 data privacy and security cheat sheet ARTICLE

 * The professionalism series: The changing landscape of human rights in Ontario
   VIDEO

 * Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Trends: Why it’s important and
   what you need to know PERSPECTIVE

 * What does the ‘S’ stand for?: Understanding the social pillar of ESG ARTICLE

Read More Read Less
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RELATED EXPERTISE

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 * Investment Management
 * Cybersecurity, Privacy & Data Protection


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 * ESG@BLG
 * Community Involvement
 * Pro Bono


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