Society is full of iconic duos: peanut butter and jelly, Mulder and Scully, and apparently legal and sustainability. A new joint survey from the Governance and Accountability Institute and Ropes & Gray explores the interplay between sustainability and legal departments. The authors used complementary surveys and interviews to examine how senior sustainability and legal professionals viewed their relationship and collaboration with one another. Ultimately, the results were largely positive. Legal and sustainability departments mutually benefit each other in a variety of ways, the survey results note:
“Sustainability teams reported benefitting [sic] from legal colleagues’ support with public disclosures, compliance with regulations, and managing business risk. Legal professionals pointed to the benefits of their sustainability colleagues’ expertise on technical topics. Legal respondents were more emphatic about the positive impacts of collaboration between sustainability and legal teams.”
Benefits identified in the report include:
- “Collaboration yields more confidence in public disclosures
- Buy-in from legal serves to reduce risk and lends added credibility to sustainability efforts
- Legal involvement enhances company-wide coordination”
- Expertise from sustainability teams enables lawyers to more efficiently manage increasing demands from sustainability-related requirements
I’ll try to pretend my feelings aren’t hurt by legal liking sustainability more than sustainability likes legal. However, as a lawyer, I acknowledge there are challenges with collaborating with my profession. The survey identified a few of these as well. Sustainability teams cited “competing priorities and goals” as the top barrier to effective collaboration with legal departments. Legal, on the other hand, felt that resource constraints such as time and budget were the biggest challenge to collaboration. Ultimately, the survey results point to a healthy relationship between sustainability and legal at most companies. The two departments have a lot of similarities and face many of the same challenges. At the same time, both sustainability and legal mutually benefit from each other’s unique perspectives and expertise.
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