About Us

Seeing change as an opportunity

Change is the only thing you can be certain of. How you prepare and react to it will often determine the success of your business.

That’s why we’ll provide you with more than expert legal advice, you’ll get a trusted partner that delivers innovative solutions to your business challenges, giving you stability, reassurance and the opportunity to achieve your commercial goals.

Change starts on the inside

Understanding the commercial, business, social, and professional landscape changes are important, but we never lose sight of changes needed closer to home. It’s good for our business – and yours.

Having a wide variety of people brings a diverse range of opinions and life experiences to the table - things we can use to create better solutions for you.

We have proactively engaged with trusted partners and our colleagues at Brook Graham to promote greater diversity, champion inclusion and expand our pay gap reporting to include gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity and disability.

We’ve made great strides in our work to create an inclusive workplace where all of our people feel they belong, but we recognise that this is an ongoing commitment. Our impact is far greater when we work together and that is why we welcome opportunities for collaboration and information sharing.

This commitment to being a responsible employer not only flows through our business, it extends out to our suppliers too, as we encourage them to follow our lead.

You can read about how we’re supporting others outside our firm, in our 'Change please’ story.

Responsible business is part of our DNA. It's what we aspire to. But what's also encouraging is, we're finding that doing business the right way often means mores success in business. We see that in the way our clients question our supply chain, it's important to them.

A change in mindset

To help improve the mental health and wellbeing of employees in the legal and banking sector and beyond, we collaborated with Barclays and Addleshaw Goddard to set up The Mindful Business Charter. It invites companies to commit to a set of principles centred on improved communication, respect for rest periods, considerate delegation of tasks and management of deadlines.

It’s something we are very proud of, so we were thrilled when it helped us win the ‘Best New Workplace Approach to Mental Health’ award at the ‘This Can Happen 2020 Awards’.

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Small changes that are starting to make a big difference

In ‘doing business the right way’, we’ve also made a commitment to The United Nations Global Compact in areas of human rights, labour, anti-corruption and the environment.

We know we can’t change the world, but by doing our bit and working with other responsible businesses like yours, we can both play our part.

You can read more about the Sustainable Development Goals we are contributing to and our progress in our 2023/2024 Responsible Business report.

Supporting change

Our Johannesburg office partnered with a project in the Mafolo area of the Soweto township to help young people access learning, resources and experiences they otherwise couldn’t. Townships are deprived areas where schools are often over-crowded.

Project Naledi is a Saturday school open to children in Soweto which provides extra teaching in school subjects and makes extra curricular activities possible, including ballet, athletics and basketball.

Pinsent Masons provides financial support to the Saturday school, including tutor expenses, catering, transportation costs and equipment. We expanded that contribution this year to include the provision of a librarian for the new library and a sanitation assistant.

There are over 20 tutors working at Project Naledi, and approximately 250 children are enrolled. The Library opened in 2021 and which gives children inside and outside of the programme access to books outside of normal school hours, while the project has also cultivated a herb and vegetable garden supplying affordable produce to the local community.

Lending our experience

Employers have a huge role to play in creating the conditions for equality of opportunity and removing the barriers faced by many people trying to achieve their full potential.

Ahead Partnership is a social enterprise that helps companies take action, supporting them in creating social value projects with young people. To be effective it has to be financially stable and must be in a position to invest. This has an impact on how it structures its fees to client companies, and it came up with a plan to secure its future stability.

To sense check and stress test that plan the board of Pinsent Masons met to discuss Ahead Partnership’s approach and provide guidance on its proposals. The board urged Ahead Partnership to be confident and bold in its plans and gave some concrete advice based on board members’ experience at Pinsent Masons and advising clients. Ahead Partnership’s founder Stephanie Burras said: “I think we have taken some real confidence from the session - knowing that we are on the right track with some things whilst giving us some valuable alternative ways of viewing issues and potential solutions. There were some great suggestions and a lot for us to think through.”

Pinsent Masons’ managing partner John Cleland said “The session was as interesting and thought-provoking for the board members as it was useful for the social enterprise. Our collective experience was clearly valuable to Ahead Partnership but it was equally valuable and stimulating for us to discuss their unique challenges and the similarities we face being purpose-led.”

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