Our Action Plan

Formalising our strategy

Ashurst created a Modern Slavery Social Impact Manager position in mid-2019 to work alongside our Modern Slavery Pro Bono Manager, allowing us to formalise our strategy and create this Modern Slavery Action Plan. The Plan comprises the three parts outlined below:

1. Understanding our role in the global anti-slavery movement
2. Building our knowledge to inspire change
3. Moving beyond compliance

This is our first Modern Slavery Action Plan and these three parts build a framework for us to think about the potential role we can play in combatting all forms of modern slavery and the steps we can take to achieve this, as a firm and with our clients, colleagues and other stakeholders.

1. Understanding our role in the global anti-slavery movement

"At Ashurst, we recognise our role, as a global law firm and member of the business community, in helping achieve positive social impacts in our broader communities. Our firm values - We're passionate about quality. We deliver through collaboration. We think differently - underpin our approach to listening to and working with community partners to support them to deliver key projects and services that make a positive social impact. We also recognise our role in driving forward important social justice conversations; and our ability to advocate for positive social change. Our starting point for working to eradicate all forms of modern slavery is to ensure we understand the context and environment that we are working in, and we can do this by embedding ourselves in key organisations and forming strong partnerships."

Ben Tidswell, Global Chairman (2013–2021)

2. Building our knowledge to inspire change

"It isn't enough to understand where we can play a role today. To enable long-term engagement and long-term change, we need to build and maintain internal knowledge on every aspect of modern slavery. The more that our Ashurst community knows, the more we can identify how our role could change over time for greater impact."

David Fitch, Director of Knowledge

A key learning from our pro bono practice has been the importance of thinking about how to capture and retain knowledge in each project in ways that allow other Ashurst lawyers to train up and participate in future work. We have also seen the cumulative impact on those projects as lawyers not only build knowledge but then begin to push themselves to learn more and be of assistance in even more complex cases as a result.

As we move from ad hoc modern slavery support to a sustained effort through both pro bono and corporate responsibility, we recognise that we need to build knowledge across Ashurst from a number of different perspectives:

• Building our knowledge as an employer of people with skills: to fully achieve our aims we need to provide sufficient information and insight to all of the people who work at Ashurst so that they can understand why we are encouraging more work in this area and can identify ways to apply their skills to the modern slavery movement.
• Educating ourselves as advisers: every lawyer or business services professional we train up on modern slavery issues becomes a double sided tool - they can support anti-slavery organisations to achieve change through pro bono and non-legal support. They can also apply that knowledge in advising our commercial clients to achieve further change.
• Building our knowledge as a business with supply chains and purchasing: we need to ensure that key decision makers know enough to push beyond basic compliance with regulation in respect of supply chains; but also to ensure that anyone at Ashurst who makes an ad hoc work-related purchase knows to ask the right questions and make the necessary checks about the provenance of those items.
• Building our knowledge as individual purchasers: as an employer of over 3,500 people with additional stakeholders well beyond that number, every hour our people spend on learning not only impacts on decisions as a business but also as individuals, with the potential to inform their own purchasing decisions and inspire them to push for change where supply chain concerns emerge.

3. Moving beyond compliance

"If we are serious about stepping up to play our role in efforts to abolish all forms of modern slavery then mere compliance with modern slavery law isn't enough. In all of our operations we will continue to ask: what more we can do?"

Paul Jenkins, Global Managing Partner