LEGAL

Our Action Plan

Ashurst's role: Understanding our role, building knowledge to inspire and moving beyond compliance

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:

Understanding our role in the global anti-slavery movement
Building our knowledge to inspire change
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)

OBJECTIVES	IMPLEMENTING ACTIONS	RESPONSIBILITY
Understand our role in addressing Modern Slavery	Critically examine all aspects of modern slavery to understand where we can best play a role as a global law firm	Global Pro Bono & Social Impact Partner Pro Bono Manager Social Impact Manager, Modern Slavery
Understand our role in addressing Modern Slavery	Undertake a global review of our pro bono practice, to consider where opportunities may arise to expand or mirror existing work across additional jurisdictions	Global Pro Bono and Social Impact Partner Pro Bono Manager
Collaborate and work in partnership with not-for-profits leading efforts in the anti-slavery movement to understand their work and achieve maximum impact	Develop meaningful partnerships with organisations in the anti-slavery movement; understand their aspirations, priorities and challenges; and work with them to leverage Ashurst's resources and stakeholders in respect of these needs	Global Pro Bono and Social Impact Partner Pro Bono Manager Social Impact Manager, Modern Slavery Social Impact Champions
	Implement pro bono and non-legal projects through which we can support the infrastructure and programmatic work of anti-slavery not-for-profits	Pro Bono Manager Social Impact Manager, Modern Slavery Social Impact Champions
	Reflect on how we can support the work of existing anti-slavery networks and develop connections with those where our support will be of most use	Global Pro Bono and Social Impact Partner Pro Bono Manager Social Impact Manager, Modern Slavery
Understand where we can support survivors of slavery	Work with organisations in the anti-slavery movement to learn and understand the issues facing those affected by slavery and our place in assisting them	Global Pro Bono and Social Impact Partner Pro Bono Manager Social Impact Manager, Modern Slavery
	Provide pro bono assistance to survivors of modern slavery	Pro Bono Manager
	Provide non-legal assistance to survivors of modern slavery	Social Impact Manager, Modern Slavery
Collaborate with the legal and business community to leverage and maximise all work in this space	Collaborate with the wider legal community and identify potential opportunities to combine resources to combat slavery	Global Pro Bono and Social Impact Partner Pro Bono Manager
	Engage with the broader business community on issues relevant to modern slavery to enable cross-collaboration and maximising of resources	Global Pro Bono and Social Impact Partner Ashurst Partners
Ensure our people engage with anti-slavery efforts	Introduce volunteering leave to encourage wider engagement with anti-slavery efforts.	Global Pro Bono and Social Impact Partner
	Use key events like our annual 'Make a Difference Month' and 'Anti-Slavery Day' as opportunities to support anti-slavery initiatives and update all employees on our progress	Global Pro Bono and Social Impact Partner Pro Bono Manager Social Impact Manager, Modern Slavery
	Provide meaningful opportunities for our people to engage with anti-slavery efforts	Global Pro Bono and Social Impact Partner Pro Bono Manager Social Impact Manager, Modern Slavery Social Impact Champions

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.

OBJECTIVES	IMPLEMENTING ACTIONS	RESPONSIBILITY
Develop a global knowledge-sharing infrastructure to enable our people to understand modern slavery	Build a knowledge-sharing framework and strategy to permanently embed our modern slavery work into our unique culture and enable anyone at Ashurst to learn more about modern slavery	Pro Bono Manager Social Impact Manager, Modern Slavery Expertise Team
	Identify opportunities to bring in specialist not-for-profits, including partner organisations, to share knowledge with our people	Pro Bono Manager Social Impact Manager, Modern Slavery Social Impact Champions
	Build internal communities of practice around elements of modern slavery that will allow us to move the dial as a collective	Pro Bono Manager Social Impact Manager, Modern Slavery Social Impact Champions
Invite our stakeholders to join us on our learning journey	Report on our progress	Global Pro Bono and Social Impact Partner
	Look for opportunities to invite key stakeholders, including our clients, suppliers, alumni and future joiners to join us in our anti-slavery efforts and knowledge sharing activities	Global Pro Bono and Social Impact Partner Pro Bono and Social Impact Teams Business Development Procurement Human Resources Alumni Office
	Engage with commercial clients to consider synergies around modern slavery	Global Pro Bono and Social Impact Partner Ashurst Partners

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 CEO

OBJECTIVES	IMPLEMENTING ACTIONS	RESPONSIBILITY
Comply with our global reporting requirements as a business in relation to modern slavery	Comply with reporting requirements in each jurisdiction that has requirements	Financial Crime & Risk
	Consider how we can go beyond reporting requirements in each jurisdiction, including mapping suppliers and reviewing contracts	Financial Crime & Risk Procurement
Ensure that all relevant activities across Ashurst are captured for the above reporting purposes	Ensure that all relevant Ashurst policies reference and enable our compliance with modern slavery regulations, and introduce new policies as required	Financial Crime & Risk
	Review internal processes and update where necessary to ensure activities are captured for reporting purposes	Financial Crime & Risk
	Capture activities on our new global social impact reporting platform and our 3E time recording system and ensure they are referenced in annual reporting on compliance activities	Global Pro Bono and Social Impact Partner Pro Bono Manager Social Impact Manager, Modern Slavery
	Encourage all departments to consider how we can build on these activities to move beyond basic compliance	Global Pro Bono and Social Impact Partner
Risk Disclosure	Report any risks we might have and how we have dealt with these	Financial Crime & Risk
Human Rights Due Diligence	Conduct human rights risk assessments and review findings	Financial Crime & Risk
Remediation Planning	Plan corrective actions including complaint handling	Financial Crime & Risk
Build and share knowledge on compliance framework	Establish a compliance-focused community of practice within the Elizabeth Ashurst Anti-Slavery Network	Pro Bono Manager
Consider how we can work with our clients around compliance (inform, advise and enable)	Identify where we can convene gatherings and other activities through which insight and best practice can be shared across industries	Social Impact Manager, Modern Slavery
	Continue to build our own knowledge and expertise to ensure we can be the best commercial adviser to our commercial clients in this area	Ashurst Partners and Lawyers
	Advise commercial clients on key considerations for Modern Slavery reporting	Ashurst Partners and Lawyers
	Look for opportunities to deploy this compliance knowledge and expertise through our pro bono work with not-for-profit organisations	Global Pro Bono and Social Impact Partner Pro Bono Manager