Kuhn Associates Sustainability Advisors LLC
Sustainable Business News 
 
Volume 2014, Number 6                                                                                         June 2014  
In This Issue
Featured Article
Ideas You Can Use NOW
Calendar of Events
About Us
We help companies throughout the product supply chain create sustainable businesses.

Consulting services
include creating enterprise-level sustainability visions, goals and strategies; re-engineering internal processes to reflect sustainable best practices; maximizing the sustainability of today's complex supply chains and assisting with communicating sustainability information in writing and in media.

Training services include webinars and in-person seminars for large to small groups on topics ranging from GHG accounting to Mastering Supply Chain Sustainability and Social Responsibility. We can custom design training to suit your needs.

Sustainability Tools include Turnkey Solutions sustainability data management software - a cloud-based data collection, management and reporting system designed with supply chain networks in mind.

 

We work in a variety of industries. We are extremely sensitive to clients' budgets and their capacity for change.
 
Whether it's an environmental or social responsibility issue, our team of professionals is ready to help your business. Please contact us to learn how we can help you.
 
Call 212-343-1006 today.


In this sixth newsletter edition of 2014, our Feature Article discusses the role that corporate lawyers can play in corporate sustainability.

In our
Ideas You Can Use Now section, we provide some specific tips about how best to engage corporate counsel in sustainability-related work.   

 

Finally, in the Calendar section, we suggest some sustainability-related events in the coming few months that you might want to investigate.

   

Happy reading!    

 

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Feature Article: The Role of Corporate Counsel in Advancing Sustainability  
 
 

Within a company, many functions can play a role in forming and advancing a corporate sustainability agenda. Often, we focus on operational roles like manufacturing or supply chain management because they oversee a lot of the process re-engineering that is required to make a company more sustainable. One function that's often overlooked, however, is that of corporate counsel. In many companies, this function (whether in house or retained) plays an essential role in compliance and risk management. It should be no surprise then to learn that corporate lawyers can ... and should ... play a key role in framing and advancing a corporate sustainability agenda.

 

Sustainability in a business context is about both risk and opportunity. Business people are great at identifying and exploiting opportunities. Lawyers, on the other hand, are primarily focused on managing and mitigating risks. What type or risks are related to sustainability? Consider:

 

  • financing risk
  • restricted access to capital
  • operational risk
  • loss of legal/social right to operate
  • barriers to expansion
  • reputational risk
  • management distraction
  • litigation and fines

 

Lawyers often have the analytical skillsets and tools to identify and manage these risks and, therefore, should be essential contributors to corporate sustainability work. Some of the ways in which corporate counsel can be of assistance in this area include:

 

  • increasing awareness (due diligence)
  • integration with risk management protocols (materiality and risk assessments)
  • engagement with stakeholders (particularly regulators)
  • preparation for unexpected impacts (and crisis management).

 

Take, for example, the challenging area of human trafficking. Here, there are numerous frameworks, principles, laws and regulations addressing corporate responsibility to uphold human rights and avoid complicity in human rights abuses. However, the applicability of any one framework, principle, law or regulation is highly context dependent. Lawyers are especially well-equipped to understand and assess those dependencies and advise their client how to proceed. Maybe it's signing onto the UN Global Compact and then integrating those human rights principles into corporate policies. Maybe it's a legal landscape scan that then integrates human trafficking-related laws into compliance protocols. Corporate counsel does this best.

 

If you work for a large multinational company, you probably already have lawyers involved in your sustainability work. In other companies, however, this function might not be required to be at the table. For many reasons, though, it should.

  

>> 
Call us or email me to discuss how we can help you integrate corporate counsel into your sustainability work.
Phone: +1-212-343-1006

Hydropower
Ideas You Can Use Now!
 

In our Features Article above, we argued in favor of involving corporate counsel in sustainability-related work. It's important to remember that a lawyer sees her primary responsibility to her client (your company) as an advisor who helps identify and avoid risks. There are, however, other things you can ask counsel to do to help advance your company's sustainability agenda. Here are three ideas that extend a lawyer's role beyond that of trusted advisor:

 

  • Ask them to be a champion. Lawyers can be excellent spokespeople for environmental and social projects. They can help craft business cases for projects by helping outline the project scope and doing some up-front due diligence (issue spotting, landscape scans) that tighten the arguments you'll make to get the green light. And often, if the boss hears that the lawyers are on board, then it's a go!
  • Let them educate. Sustainability is not most people's day job. Lawyers have specialized knowledge that they can provide to management to get them up to speed on the issues, associated risks and possible solutions. Ask counsel to draft a white paper on a sustainability subject designed for a management audience.
  • Have them establish context. Sustainability is broad in scope. Not every issue applies to every company. Even different business units operating in different geographies are affected uniquely. Lawyers can help assess the materiality of environmental and social impacts by engaging with key regulatory stakeholders and others to provide insight into what matters currently and prospectively (ask them to try to find out what types of laws or regulations are being considered and have a good likelihood of future implementation).

 

These are great value-added services that take lawyers beyond the realm of the traditional compliance function. They will respect you for asking them to contribute in this way and you'll have better success in sustainability as a result.

  

The UN Global Compact has developed some great materials on this subject and is working on more. Visit http://www.unglobalcompact.org/issues/human_rights/lawyers_as_leaders.html.

 

>> If you have questions or comments please contact us. We have solutions for you. Contact us now by calling 212-343-1006 or emailing us at [email protected].


Calendar of Events
Here are a few of the many interesting sustainability events happening in the coming months that we think are worthy of your attention.
 

September 4 - 5, San Francisco, CA - EPI's 4th Annual Energy Policy Research Conference  is the premier energy policy research conference held in the Western United States. Dr. Steven Chu, who served as the U.S. Secretary of Energy under the Obama administration, will be delivering the keynote address. Visit http://epi.boisestate.edu/conference/welcome.aspx for more information.

 

September 24 - 26, Cambridge, MA - New Metrics '14 will explore the future of sustainable business metrics. The three-day event examines leading-edge work that expands the way business can create, quantify, manage and communicate value and enhance financial performance with shared value. Top sustainability strategists from a variety of sectors will explore models for quantifying the environmental and social impacts of business activity. Go to http://goo.gl/QCkWRh for more information.

 

September 30, Boston, MA - Getting Value From EH&S Software & Technologies is a Verdantix summit that offers attendees a unique meeting place to hear how other companies are getting value from EH&S technologies, to get research data which will help you strengthen the business case for EH&S IT investments and to align your thinking with emerging trends towards operational risk management, sustainability reporting and global deployments of integrated EH&S platforms. Visit http://www.verdantixsummit-ehs.com/sample-page/ for further information and to register.

 

October 1 - 3, Durham, NH - Corporate Sustainability Leadership Program is a 3-day Corporate Sustainability Leadership Program that immerses mid to senior level professionals in guided exploration, coursework, case studies and site visits that address why sustainability matters to today's business, building the business case and communicating efforts to stakeholders. Visit http://sustainabilitycertificate.org/ to register.

 

October 27 - 30, San Francisco, CA - VERGE San Francisco is this year's installment of GreenBiz's world-renowned VERGE conference. The event brings together the world's largest companies, technology innovators, and cities to create a broad ecosystem of players to break down silos and create opportunities for business. Go to http://events.greenbiz.com/events/verge/san-francisco/2014 for more info.

Thanks for reading! Please contact us today to discuss anything you've read here, suggest a topic for a future Newsletter edition or learn how we can help you build a more sustainable business.

Call 212-343-1006 or email us at
[email protected] for more information.

Sincerely, 

Robert W. Kuhn, President and Senior Advisor
Kuhn Associates Sustainability Advisors LLC
Copyright 2014  Kuhn Associates Sustainability Advisors LLC
Reproduction without prior permission prohibited.