In the legal profession, lawyers have long taken on pro bono work. Today, however, firms are also becoming more deeply involved in the communities in which they operate, with staff offering to volunteer their time in areas that go beyond purely legal matters. The leaders in this field (click here for rankings) are those firms that have aligned their citizenship activities with their businesses, created dedicated teams and departments and integrated their initiatives into the day-to-day management of the firm.

In some cases, projects emerge from the energy and passion of certain individuals. At Simmons & Simmons, it was Mahnaz Malik, this year’s winner of the Innovative Individual award, who spearheaded a project to give legal assistance to children in detention in Pakistan. Today, Project Advocate – which aims to take on the representation of more than 455 cases of children during their detention in Karachi and Lahore over a two-year period – has its own legal team responsible for channelling free legal services to these children.

This project demonstrates that even when individuals are behind citizenship initiatives, management structures are necessary to secure the long-term viability of the programmes. At Lovells, for example, a corporate responsibility panel is charged with developing and implementing pro bono projects, environmental initiatives and community investments. The panel reports quarterly to the firm’s international operations committee.

The need for legal services is not only critical for those such as the children of Pakistan. Charities and non-profit organisations are themselves finding that the need for legal services is pressing. “They are coming under greater scrutiny,” says Penny Chapman, head of the charities practice at Bircham Dyson Bell. “Accounting regulations have become ever stricter and there’s far more accountability.”

For many firms, offering pro bono work – whether to individuals or non-profits and charities – remains at the heart of corporate responsibility strategies. At Weil, Gotshal & Manges, one of the main elements of the firm’s corporate citizenship policy is a goal for every lawyer to perform at least 50 hours of pro bono work a year. In 2006, the number of hours donated by the firm – 87,000 – was the equivalent of 44 full-time associate positions.

A key point for the legal profession is whether or not pro bono hours can be included in lawyers’ annual billable hours. In addition to allowing five days a year for voluntary work, Allen & Overy allows fee-earning lawyers to count 25 hours of pro bono work as part of their chargeable hours – the first “magic circle” firm to do so.

“Law firms have long advocated public service via their pro bono work and the concept of the citizen lawyer is deeply ingrained in the culture,” explains Aron Cramer, a former lawyer who now heads Business for Social Responsibility, an advisory group whose membership includes many leading multinationals. “That’s the profession at its best.”

Yet while offering services on a pro bono basis is common, many law firms are also becoming involved in broader community projects. And for international firms, that community can be widely spread. As well as conducting a pro bono initiative with the United Nations World Food Programme, DLA Piper has projects with the French Red Cross the Danish Refugee Council respectively

Clifford Chance is working with one of its clients, Citigroup, on a pro bono basis to develop an easy-to-use, multi-jurisdictional legal template that will help microfinance institutions across the world gain access to large-scale commercial funding.

As with corporate responsibility initiatives in other sectors, the concept of partnership is now a key one. Increasingly, law firms are linking their citizenship initiatives to key clients and entering long-term relationships with non-profit organisations and charities.

Project Shoreditch – which aims to promote urban regeneration in Hackney – is an innovative collaboration that brings together Linklaters, Deutsche Bank, UBS and the East London Business Alliance, a non-governmental organisation that fosters the involvement of business in social and economic regeneration.

For some firms, the approach has been to focus on one single project rather than on spreading their resources across a variety of charities and causes. One example is the extension of Slaughter and May’s volunteering initiative with St Luke’s Primary School in Islington, north London – which was used to help develop literacy and numeracy – into a playground redevelopment project.

The firm not only made a large grant to the school to cover costs, but also worked closely with the school on the development of the plans for the playground and helped source materials, using the firm’s recycled equipment wherever possible. The firm says that such a project was only possible “due to the trust built up between the school and ourselves over the playground redevelopment”.

As well as reaching out to the broader community, some firms are looking within their own walls at the sustainability of their operations. For some, this means fostering a diverse workforce, a marker on which the legal sector has traditionally performed poorly.

For other firms the environmental footprint of their activities is an issue of growing concern. A sustainability initiative launched by DLA Piper, for example, aims to reduce the environmental impact of the firm’s operations around the world by obtaining an ISO 14001 certification, achieving carbon neutrality for all business air travel and setting targets for cutting carbon emissions.

Unlike many law firms, DLA Piper aims to reduce its carbon footprint by emissions reductions measures rather than, as the firm puts it, “buying our way out of the problem through the purchase of carbon offsets”.

While senior staff at law firms may be responsible for shaping such environmental or community initiatives, as well as corporate citizenship strategies in general, the desire of staff to contribute is becoming an important driver. The performance of firms in this area is a way to attract top talent.

“People feel the need to put something back into the community where they work,” says Mark Nichols, a partner in charge of CSR activities at CMS Cameron McKenna. “And people want a bit of comfort that firms they’re joining are doing so.”