Poul Schmith

FOCUS ON GREEN TRANSITION

As a firm, we take on corporate social responsibility by contributing to the green transition and the am-bitions in the Danish Government's Climate Act. We wish to reduce our own carbon footprint, and we would also like to contribute through our legal advice. As far as we know, we are the first Danish law firm that has presented a carbon footprint report. We are proud of this, and it is a testament to sus-tainability being very important to our top management and that sustainability is also one of the benchmarks of our board of directors.

PART OF THE COMMUNITY

As the first law firm in Denmark we joined the green think tank CONCITO in 2019. Our attorneys work pro bono in a number of working groups to drive the climate agenda.

We have also agreed to the ten principles of sustainability of the UN Global Compact and support the 17 sustainable development goals. We have consequently committed ourselves to report annually on our progress in the area of sustainability in the broad sense.

We are a member of AdvokatKODEKS where we have committed to report annually on how we work with sustainability and ethics in the broad sense, including anti-corruption, environmental and climate considerations, equal rights, diversity, etc.

CARBON FOOTPRINT REPORT

70% REDUCTION IN 2030

Based on our internal CO2 mapping that has resulted in a carbon footprint report, we have undertaken to reduce our total emission per employee by 70% by 2030. This is why our carbon footprint report does not only include our own direct emission but also our indirect emission, ie the emission from the means of transport that we use, the emission by our sub-suppliers from their production of the products that we buy from them, etc. We choose to be completely transparent about our baseline and progress with 2018 as the base.

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY THAT MAKES SENSE

WE ACT FROM DAY ONE, AND TAKE ON RESPONSIBILITY IMMEDIATELY

As a firm, we have launched a large number of initiatives to help us fulfil our ambition:

• increased separation of waste for biofuel
• focus on food waste in our canteens by introducing "The Surplus Box" where employees can buy surplus food to take home
• establishing a strategy for green purchases and green supplier management (utilities and build-ings, office expenses, furniture and equipment, merchandise, IT and server hosting, etc)
• focus on phasing out disposable packing
• more than 80% of our office space now receives power from wind turbines which means a reduc-tion in our carbon emission. The remaining areas are leased premises, and we are in dialogue with our landlord about a transition to green power
• reducing print and printouts
• starting the work of drafting an offsetting and transport policy

All the initiatives are employee-driven. Fulfilling our ambition of a 70% reduction by 2030 will be a long haul. But already from 2020, we have decided to offset, on an annual basis, the gap that we have up to the 70% target.

OFFSETTING DOES NOT REPLACE ACTION, BUT IS A SUPPLEMENT

It is our primary focus and firm position to concentrate on an organic (actual) reduction towards 2030, ie the long haul, so that only what cannot be reduced or cannot be reduced in the short run is offset. This is why we will also see a reduction over time in our offsetting as we start to see the effects of our organ-ic reduction initiatives.

THE OFFSETTING FOCUS WILL BE ON ENSURING AN EFFECT

As a principle, we will only invest in Gold Standard-certified offsetting projects that comply with our values of verification, transparency and "additionality" (the project had not been carried out if we had not invested in it). All this contributes to making sure that our offsetting has the biggest possible effect for the benefit of society.

FOUR DIMENSIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY

As a firm, we deal with sustainability within four dimensions

• Responsibility for the environment and the climate
• Responsibility for humans. Governance code, equal rights, diversity, working conditions, supplier responsibility, etc
• Responsibility for data security and tech solutions
• Social responsibility.

ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSIBILITY/CLIMATE RESPONSIBILITY

RESPONSIBILITY FOR HUMANS

RESPONSIBILITY FOR TECH/DATA

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY