This report from Corporate Counsel and Morrison & Foerster reveals the results of their recent survey of 79 respondents consisting of GCs, CLOs, and other in-house public and private company lawyers, aimed at understanding how and to what extent the legal department is involved in ESG.
Among the key findings:
- Nearly all of the legal departments represented by the respondents (but less than half of respondents personally) reported leading a material portion of the company’s ESG initiatives.
- Respondents ranked Governance higher as an area of company focus than Social, Environmental, and Human Capital issues. Although Environmental garnered the lowest ranking, nearly half of respondents said their company had changed its approach to environmental action in the last 12 months – most commonly with regard to strategic decision-making, as shown here:
Changes in approach to environmental action were motivated by many factors, with the top three being improvement of brand image/reputation (85%), market competition (73%), and investor pressure (54%).
- More than half (51%) of respondents said that their company has established carbon neutrality/net zero emissions goals and considers the environmental policies and records of their vendors in its decision-making (56%); one-fifth said their company has identified and adopted environmental performance goals.
- Most companies (86%) represented by the respondents provide ESG disclosure, characterized as voluntarily disclosure by half, mandatory disclosure by 40%, and a mix of voluntary and mandatory by the balance of the respondents.
- A plurality of respondents identified data collection and verification as the greatest challenge in ESG implementation.
See the survey infographic; MoFo’s release; this Corporate Counsel article; and additional resources on our Sustainability page.
This post first appeared in the weekly Society Alert!