Osborne Clarke for Good 2025 report
In our latest UK Responsible Business report we share how OC for Good benefitted our people, our clients and our communities by:
- Working to reduce our impact on the environment and support other businesses to do the same
- Supporting our people to thrive and investing in creating a diverse and inclusive workforce
- Taking our responsibilities to society seriously and striving to make a difference across four areas of impact: education, environment, equality and poverty
We also look at the progress we made against our objectives in FY 24/25, the challenges we faced, and look ahead to some of the projects we have planned for FY 25/26.
A message from our Managing Partner
I’m pleased to share our annual UK Responsible Business report, which affirms our ongoing commitments and tracks our progress this year. OC for Good is the banner for all the good work our people do to bring positive change into our firm and our communities, and we believe is essential to attracting and retaining the best talent in the years ahead.
I’d like to thank our people for their incredible commitment to OC for Good and specifically the Responsible Business team for their work to stimulate, harness and capture those efforts. I hope you find our progress and learnings both inspiring and valuable.
As we move forward, we will set more ambitious goals, and take an ever more connected and data-informed approach to drive progress across all our priorities.
Conrad Davies, Managing Partner
What went well in FY 24/25
Emissions reduction ahead of target
Work to reduce our emissions included a successful carbon budget for business travel pilot. This helped us achieve an 18% reduction in emissions year on year, putting us ahead on our trajectory to meet our 2030 target.
Minoritised ethnic representation
The actions taken to improve representation in our partnership meant we achieved the overarching goal in our Race Action Plan, 6% of partners being from minoritised ethnic backgrounds, ahead of target.
Reverse mentoring programme
In addition to gender and ethnicity, we had an LGBTQ+ theme in our third reverse mentoring programme, which involved 28 pairs and resulted in an enhanced understanding of the lived experiences of others.
High engagement in our employee pulse surveys
Our quarterly wellbeing pulse surveys have had consistently high response rates (~71%), giving us
valuable data and insights and enabling us to be more responsive.
Variety of pro bono projects
Our teams worked 6,579 hours (valued at over £3m) to support organisations in need. This included renewable energy projects, diversity and inclusion cases and human rights issues.
Bridge programme
We delivered another successful year of our innovative school partnership programme, upskilling young people for future employment, and enhancing our partnerships through peer mentoring between OC leaders and school leaders.
Areas that still need focus
Our partnership gender gap
Despite incremental improvements we haven’t made as much progress as we hoped towards our 30% target of women in the partnership this year, but we have continued to implement strategies and improve family friendly policies to address the gender imbalance, such as doubling our second parent leave provision.
Our attrition rate of colleagues from minoritised ethnic backgrounds
We have updated our Race Action Plan in an effort to reduce our attrition gap.
Rolling out Carbon Literacy training to suppliers
We have been engaging our suppliers on net zero and plan to hold our first Carbon Literacy session with suppliers next year.
I invite our clients, colleagues and suppliers to challenge ourselves and each other on our journey to becoming a more responsible business.
A good business
Being a good business means leading by example, by doing business in a fair, ethical and sustainable way.
Investing in reducing our environmental impact is not only vital for creating a cleaner, healthier environment for our people and the communities we serve—it’s also a business imperative. It helps us better understand the challenges of decarbonisation, refine our processes, and drive innovative solutions.
Our employee network, OC Planet, plays a vital role in raising awareness and engaging colleagues to change the way we work. It’s inspiring to see our members driving change across the firm.
A good employer
At Osborne Clarke we want our people to thrive in a high performing environment.
This means investing in creating a diverse and inclusive firm and a safe, healthy and enriching working environment which recognises the importance of wellbeing. This ambition is founded on our belief that inclusion and wellbeing are critical to delivering a business that is sustainable.
A good corporate citizen
We want to use our skills, expertise and resources to make a lasting, positive impact on society, particularly in our local communities.
We do this by focusing our actions on four social impact themes: Access to Essentials, Access to Opportunities, Access to Justice and Access to Nature.
Our commitments for FY 25/26
- A good business
In our net zero milestone plan:
- Roll out the business travel carbon budget firmwide from May 2025
- Achieve 25% of colleagues trained in Carbon Literacy by April 2026
- Invite suppliers to participate in our first external Carbon Literacy course.
- A good employer
Advance our Race and Gender Action Plans with particular focus on:
- Recruitment – continue removing bias and diversifying appointments; offer ‘Affinity Meetings’ for candidates to meet with colleagues with similar lived experiences and backgrounds during their interview process.
- Retention and inclusion – expand our Inclusion Allies and Reverse Mentoring Programmes; launch mandatory anti-racism training for partners and business services leaders.
- Progression – concentrate on equitable work allocation; improve the diversity of our coaching pool and launch a leadership development programme for minoritised ethnic colleagues.
- Wellbeing – integrate wellbeing data and insights into holistic people dashboards for leaders; strengthen our Wellbeing Champions network to help reduce stigma around wellbeing conversations; continue our Smart Performance programme, focusing on focus time, feedback and emails.
- A good corporate citizen
Maintain our commitment and improve our impact across our key programmes by:
- Targeting 6,500 hours pro bono work during FY 25/26
- Delivering 3,500 volunteering hours across our social impact themes in FY 25/26
- Distributing £275,000 by April 2026 from OC Charitable Trust to causes aligned with our social impact themes
- Identifying and launching three new local charity partnerships, with fundraising targets to April 2027
- Streamlining our work and strengthening relationships with schools on The Bridge programme, continuing the peer-mentoring started through Inspiration for All and exploring what more we can do to deepen the impact of our partnerships.
Our UK Executive Board
