Respons­ible and sus­tain­able entre­pren­eur­ship is inher­ent to our val­ues and to the way we do busi­ness. This enables us to provide long-term added value for our employ­ees, cli­ents and the soci­ety and envir­on­ment of which we are a part. We chan­nel our cor­por­ate social respons­ib­il­ity efforts into the fol­low­ing core areas.

HVG Law is one of the found­ing mem­bers of Pro Bono Connect. Pro Bono Con­nect medi­ates between Dutch civil soci­ety organ­isa­tions in need of leg­al assist­ance and lead­ing law firms who wish to provide free leg­al advice.

It is very import­ant to us that as an organ­iz­a­tion we can add value to soci­ety. We also see that our (new) employ­ees find this import­ant and are eager to con­trib­ute, but our cli­ents also appre­ci­ate our con­tri­bu­tion in the area of social involve­ment. With­in HVG Law we give sub­stance to this, amongst oth­er things, through our affil­i­ation with Pro Bono Con­nect by offer­ing free leg­al advice and sup­port to a broad group of social organ­iz­a­tions (NGOs) that pro­mote the gen­er­al interest in the field of human rights.

Our Pro Bono Con­nect team reviews applic­a­tions from Pro Bono Con­nect and, when pos­sible, advises the civil soci­ety organ­iz­a­tions on their con­crete request for help.

Each year the team helps about 15 NGOs with dif­fer­ent requests.

Recently, the team assisted the Wid­ows and Orphans found­a­tion in apply­ing for ANBI status with the tax author­it­ies. This found­a­tion works self­lessly for the rights of wid­ows and orphans in Africa (mainly in Tan­zania). Below the feed­back from Jam­ila Sulu, founder and pres­id­ent of WODF:

“We sin­cerely thank HVG Law for provid­ing this incred­ible leg­al sup­port on a Pro Bono basis to enable the Wid­ows and Orphans Devel­op­ment Found­a­tion to obtain ANBI (Gen­er­al Bene­fit Insti­tu­tion) status under Dutch law. Your high degree of pro­fes­sion­al­ism and com­mit­ment in facil­it­at­ing this pro­cess is greatly appre­ci­ated.”

Oth­er NGOs that the Pro Bono Con­nect team has assisted include: Green­peace Inter­na­tion­al and She Mat­ters.

Of course, Cor­por­ate Sus­tain­ab­il­ity & ESG can be inter­preted much more broadly than what we do for Pro Bono Con­nect. Through our stra­tegic alli­ance with EY Tax and as part of the Glob­al EY Law Net­work, we are able to con­trib­ute to pro­grams with a very large impact on Cor­por­ate Sus­tain­ab­il­ity & ESG such as our con­tri­bu­tion to EY’s Ripples pro­gram, which in addi­tion to impact­ing entre­pren­eurs such as the NGOs we sup­port through Pro Bono Con­nect, sup­ports the next gen­er­a­tion and accel­er­at­ing envir­on­ment­al sus­tain­ab­il­ity.

As part of this, HVG Law par­ti­cip­ates in Social Impact Days, focused on chil­dren from dis­ad­vant­aged back­grounds. These chil­dren can often use some extra atten­tion. Social Impact Days offer them the chance to dis­cov­er what is pos­sible in the near future in terms of work and oppor­tun­it­ies.

A healthy envir­on­ment is import­ant to our people and our organ­iz­a­tions. We have iden­ti­fied a num­ber of in-house ini­ti­at­ives to reduce our envir­on­ment­al impact. This has res­ul­ted in policies focused, for example, on redu­cing energy and paper con­sump­tion, sourcing envir­on­ment­ally friendly products, encour­aging the use of elec­tric cars and intro­du­cing an eco­lo­gic­ally respons­ible travel policy for all staff mem­bers.

HVG Law offers employ­ees every oppor­tun­ity to devel­op, grow and be suc­cess­ful. One of the ways we do this is by integ­rat­ing cor­por­ate social respons­ib­il­ity into our in-house train­ing pro­grams through HVG Law School. In this way, employ­ees are provided with the tools to help them devel­op into com­pet­ent and socially skilled indi­vidu­als in soci­ety.

Cre­at­ing a healthy work­ing envir­on­ment for our employ­ees con­trib­utes to the qual­ity of our ser­vices.