The SRB managing director shares why he believes giving back is so important to law firms
In the first half of his interview with NZ Lawyer, Saunders Robinson Brown (SRB) managing director Jonathan Gillard went into detail about the firm’s three-year sponsorship of Cancer Society Southern. While this is the firm’s first major sponsorship, it’s not the first time SRB has backed community initiatives.
The firm has financially supported Te Rangatahi Tumanako Trust (The Youth Hope Trust) and Kilmarnock Enterprises. It has backed golf tournaments, and last year, it announced its sponsorship of the Hagley Oval Members Marquee in Christchurch.
SRB has also supported Canterbury garden tours and school events and has for five years now offered the SRB Early Legal Scholarship prize and the Trusts prize in partnership with the University of Canterbury. In the second part of the interview, Gillard talks the “feel-good factor” in pro bono work, and why he thinks New Zealand as a country is good at giving to the community.
Have you done any other pro bono projects in recent years?
Many smaller organisations have come to us looking for support, and we will continue to do those ad hoc ones. We are always getting asked to assist in those areas and we like to be able to support the community as much as we can. But this [Cancer Society Southern sponsorship] will be our major first formal sponsorship.
Do you currently have a specific pro bono target that you're going for, or are you looking to establish one?
Oh no, we don't have a specific target. We get so many requests for things we do, especially around sporting organisations. I think it's probably something we will need to be looking at, although this particular sponsorship in itself will be a large sponsorship for us.
There’s certainly a lot of pro bono work that gets done within the firm, but it's probably more ad hoc because we're not that corporatised. We're not a really large firm where everybody's so accountable for their day that we can't make people available to do pro bono work when asked by organisations that we might have a relationship with. But I can see that potentially, it would be worthwhile for us to measure that more, whether it's just a “nice to know”.
We did look at this in our revenue turnover, as to what would be an expected amount of sponsorship for our revenue. And I think we landed on what we thought was a pretty reasonable level of sponsorship based on our turnover.
Why is it important for law firms to be supporting these types of organisations and these causes?
We see ourselves as not just a business and a law firm but being part of the community. We have 85 people working in SRB, so we are part of the wider community through our legal and business family. So I think the expectation these days is that businesses will look to the community that they are part of – there's a bit of a social contract.
Not only are we providing employment but also, we're giving back to the wider community and giving the employees the opportunity to be part of that support for the community. So there's a feel-good factor to it. We’re supporting the community and actually facilitating people to be able to make progress in their lives, and we can support people where they might not be able to otherwise access legal services and financial support. We are happy to do all of that.
We have a model of being the best at what we do in a great place to work, and I think that a great place to work isn't just here but also outside of the firm. So the people who work here have opportunities to extend themselves and support the community.
What do you think can the legal profession as a whole do to contribute more to these types of initiatives?
It would be nice if law firms as much as possible, as well as other professional firms, supported community causes across the board. Quite often we get a little bit hung up with supporting only those activities which have high recognition, such as theatre. And no disrespect to supporting theatre, but it might have a demographic which we are trying to attract. Whereas I think in this case, [cancer] is something which affects one in three New Zealanders; by supporting [Cancer Society Southern], we think we're really supporting the whole of the community. But I think any community organisation which is in itself supporting the community is worthwhile supporting.
We see it very much in Christchurch with the charity hospital, where you've got practising doctors giving their time freely to provide operations to people who otherwise would be missing out. So I think that giving to the community is a strong thing. I think we as a country are pretty well known for that sort of support. It might not always be financial; often it is grassroots chipping in. Whether it's a sporting organisation, medical, legal – I think we're pretty good as a country.
