Delegates at RAOGlobal Europe 2022 on November 22nd will hear from 26 Leaders across the Financial Community and Dr Roger Miles who adds his highly respected insights into this report.

A conversation is needed to get everyone thinking pro-socially and behaving in a way that spontaneously aligns claims to ESG-positive behaviour. How in practice does the planet, and human society, benefit from a firm’s stated ESG posture?

It’s all very well introducing ESG indicators, but how far should we regard these numbers as aspirational or as a genuine account of “what’s actually happening” at the business end of a law firm? When any organization

introduces new indicators, especially for behaviour change, the measures can trigger perverse consequences : virtue-signalling, teaching-to-the-test, performative compliance.34 Any law firm that’s serious about engaging with ESG, whether on its own account or advising clients about this, would do best to start by reflecting on ESG’s underlying intent – which is not to impose metrics for their own sake but to raise societal awareness and stimulate collective action.

For a law practice that’s serious about addressing this broader aim, the first task should thus be to step away from the metrics and simply start a conversation. True ESG engagement springs from all-staff conversations at ground level; gathering anecdotes and encouraging purposeful agreement on ESG-positive attitudes that drive day-to-day, socially positive behaviour.

On which point, it’s good to see the legal profession collectively starting to confront a few awkward questions of past complicity in socially destructive behaviour, whether as employer or client’s enabler. Like any long-established sector, law practices have legacy behavioural issues which are out of step with new public expectations of “what good behaviour looks like”. To their credit, many of the profession’s leaders are now taking this into account.

By way of example: For the best of reasons — to protect the client’s reputation and market access — law firms’ instinct historically was to seek to “gag” anyone who called attention to questionable behaviour by a client or by one of their own business units. Whilst of course we’ve all paid lip-service to legal protection for genuine whistleblowers,35 the much-reported “lonely road” experiences of anyone who speaks out suggest that actual protection is patchy at best.36 Whistleblowing is in any case a poorly conceived risk control, activating only after harm is done. A better risk control would seek out early and weak signals of not-quite-right behaviour, then intervene to nip them in the bud.

On the front line in the firm, any staffer who’s had to put up with obnoxious behaviour will first wonder how hard they should listen to the quiet prompting of their natural conscience to speak up about it. Before saying anything, they’ll also recall others’ reported experiences of facing reprisals, ostracism and career reversal.37 The younger employee intake knows this

Dr Roger Miles researches and advises on applying psychology- based design solutions to financial and professional misconduct.

He is a regular panellist at the Cambridge University International Symposium on Economic Crime, and is Head of Faculty at UK Finance’s Conduct Academy. His popular handbooks for practitioners include Conduct Risk Management: A behavioural approach and Culture Audit in Financial Services – recently reviewed by regulators as “important, comprehensive and highly engaging”

Download the full report here