Dr Steven Vaughan and Professor Robert Lee have been awarded a Legal Sustainability Alliance Grant, for the project ‘Law Firms, Sustainability and Demand-side Drivers’.
Various research to date has explored the relationship between law firms and their clients, in particular what clients are looking for when they ask lawyers to tender for work. However, so far no work has examined the extent to which sustainability is a matter of interest for clients in choosing the law firms they engage and in the requirement s they make of firms. This project thus seeks to remedy this scholarly gap.
With the help of a research assistant, Dr Vaughan and Professor Lee will conduct an online survey and a series of one-on-one interviews with lawyers advising corporate clients on their experience of how sustainability is used in tendering for legal services. This will result in a detailed report, a glossy executive summary of the findings, and an article to be published in a leading law journal.
The project was awarded £12,500 and, having started in August, will reach its conclusion in March 2017.