Drafting contracts may not sound like edge-of-your-seat stuff. But for Matt Gingell, it’s magical. “Every time you use a contract, it's an opportunity for impact,” he says. 

Gingell is the founder and chair of Chancery Lane Project, a nonprofit that provides clauses that anyone can insert into commercial agreements and legal documents. (Chancery Lane, in London, is the historic heart of the UK’s legal profession.) Drafted and peer-reviewed by legal and environmental experts around the world, these clauses encourage rapid decarbonisation and reduced climate impact, and have been used by companies like Vodafone, Salesforce and Australian telecoms firm Telstra, public bodies like the UK’s Environment Agency, and New Zealand’s green investment bank. In fact, they’re relevant to “virtually everything in the world that has a contract”.

How does it work in practice? A lender might add a clause that requires the borrower to set net-zero targets. Or a company might include wording to avoid “baking in” harmful practices. Gingell recalls an organisation that, having declared a climate emergency, wanted to move its energy contract onto a green tariff. But it was locked into a five-year deal to buy energy produced from polluting sources. A more carefully worded contract could have prevented this.

“As technology is evolving so quickly, the ability to pivot or amend the contract and move to greener technologies is incredibly important across many, many sectors,” says Gingell, who created Chancery Lane Project in 2019, alongside his day job in corporate law. That’s particularly relevant for public sector bodies that procure goods and services years in advance. 

The documentation, drafted by hundreds of legal brains working pro bono, also saves time. “Most contracting professionals, particularly lawyers, are really time-poor,” says Gingell. Right now, they’re preoccupied with factoring in everything from inflation to sanctions and armed conflict. “It's hard to make time and space for climate.”

Child’s play

New legislation is sometimes named either after the person who drove its creation, or after a person whose tragic story inspired the change. Chancery Lane Project clauses – named “Madeline’s clause”, “Rafa’s clause”, “Adam’s clause” and so on – are a little different: each one represents a child chosen by the drafting team, whose future will ultimately be affected by this work. 

“Lots of people who don't understand the narrative think it's lawyers’ egos, naming the causes after the person who did the drafting. It's really nice to correct them,” says Gingell. By avoiding attribution to any particular lawyer, the project also emphasises the project’s collaborative nature. And the connection with the next generation is fitting: the spark for the initiative came when Gingell’s then five-year old daughter asked him what a lawyer does. His short answer was that they “help people” – but, when he tried to elaborate, he realised that the profession could do so much more.

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“I had this epiphany that we have all this agency as lawyers,” he says, because “clients trust us on what to draft”. His “North star” became using his legal skills to make the world more sustainable.

Chancery Lane Project works because it doesn’t involve campaigning or telling CEOs what to do, the founder believes. “A contract sets obligations and manages risks, and it aligns itself to everyday business. I think that's the magic of it, the simplicity of it: it’s aligned with what you do already. Just a few tweaks can set a relationship on a different path,” he says. 

And if businesses lead the way, he hopes, lawmakers will be more ambitious. “We need some quite transformational legislation… if the economy has shifted towards where that transformation is going to go, then it makes the legislators’ job much easier.”

Floodgates

Chancery Lane Project began with Gingell making every cold call, and working “every evening, every weekend, every family holiday”. By 2020, the “floodgates” had opened: multinationals were knocking on their doors instead. In 2023 it became an independent charity, with philanthropic funding now secured for three years. Funders include the Laudes Foundation, DRK Foundation, Ikea Foundation and ClimateWorks Foundation.

So what’s next? The“doctrine” of climate contracting is now fairly well established, Gingell says, so the charity is focusing on pushing adoption of its clauses. It's also looking to track the emissions reduced through its work (which is challenging, due to corporate confidentiality). And 37 teams of lawyers are working to transpose the clauses for use in different jurisdictions around the world. 

The legal profession is “much maligned, and it doesn't articulate its social value very well,” Gingell says. That may be changing, as initiatives like the Chancery Lane Project build momentum. “This is not about me, in the same way that most law projects get set up. It's about collective good. I want our profession to be one that people love, not despise.”

A focus on collective good is, some argue, long overdue. Paul Powlesland, who also founded Lawyers for Extinction Rebellion, has pointed out that it was lawyers who found ways to give rights and legal protection to companies – “entirely fictional entities, that we made up” – long before doing the same for “trees, rivers and wildlife, things which actually exist, and which we fundamentally depend on for our own survival”.  No wonder then, he suggests, that nature is suffering so much destruction – “barely a fraction” of what is dedicated to the interests of companies goes towards nature’s interests. 

Read more: The role of law: an emergency service for the 21st century? 

But he believes this can be reversed. “At the root of almost all current ecological crises is fundamentally the idea that nature is a resource to be exploited. English lawyers have had a real hand in creating this idea and we should be at the forefront of imagining how the law can relate to nature differently,” he says.

Many are already itching to achieve things. Emma Montlake runs the Environmental Law Foundation (ELF), a UK charity that helps grassroots communities and nature charities to access free environmental law advice via its network of lawyers and scientists. She reports a recent upsurge among larger city firms wanting to work with ELF, with individual lawyers pushing their firms to work on “interesting pro bono work where nature’s protection is at stake,” she says. ELF also has partnerships with 20 universities, and sees significant interest from student and young lawyers to “do things differently”.

Pro bono work, of course, has long been a feature of the legal profession. A 2022 study of 245 firms around the world found that 61% had at least one staff member in a pro bono role; while staff retention and skills development are among the drivers for giving time for free, 96% of firms cited “desire to help the community” as a reason. Hogan Lovells, for instance, provides over 156,000 hours of pro bono advice per year, and increasingly that’s directed to initiatives focused on innovative ways of tackling climate change and biodiversity loss, according to Yasmin Waljee, international pro bono partner at Hogan Lovells, and also a trustee of the Chancery Lane Project. “Our lawyers are keen to use their skills to support those addressing the climate and ecological crisis,” she says. “Their advice can have a real impact.”

Climate may be front of mind now, but there have been activist lawyers throughout history, Mond Wedd points out, helping drive major changes from women’s rights to the abolition of slavery. “When you see public consciousness forming and saying, ‘Hold on, is this right? Should we be doing this?’, it's usually lawyers, working alongside activists and campaigners, at the forefront of those big movements,” she says. “Laws really are just a system of rules that reflect our moral codes and society. So they're constantly changing and evolving. And lawyers can help with this process, pushing for laws to be changed as public moods shift.”

Neutrality has traditionally been a core principle of legal practice, because it ensures that everyone gets fair representation. But is that still relevant? Trainee lawyers learn about rationality and objectivity,  but climate change has created “unprecedented circumstances”, says Mond Wedd. “I don't think lawyers should be neutral about the crisis we face. But we do need to try and stay within the law. I think history will look back at anyone who was fighting to save the planet in a positive way – in the same way that we look back at the people who helped get women's rights on the agenda.”

As Montlake points out, it would be naive to think that lawyers everywhere are on board. While many are “fighting the good fight”, others spend their time defending some of the world’s biggest polluters. And others fall somewhere in between: many “wonderful people” give time to ELF for free, even while their day job involves working with ethically questionable clients. The wider industry also needs to catch up. While investors measure their “financed emissions” (that is, carbon emissions associated with their financing and investment activities), law firms are not required to factor in “advised emissions” (emissions occurring as a result of their clients’ activities) as part of their carbon footprint, Gingell points out, speaking in a personal capacity.

Taking an ethical stance is, however, becoming more feasible. In 2023, more than 170 UK lawyers declared that they would refuse to prosecute climate protesters or represent new fossil fuel projects. Shortly afterwards, the Law Society issued new guidance saying that solicitors may “decline to advise on matters that are incompatible with the 1.5°C goal”. 

Gingell is somewhat pragmatic about this. While he is “fully behind” any firms that turn down a potential client, divestment won’t solve everything – there will always be someone else willing to take them on. Similarly, individual lawyers wanting to refuse work yet still progress their career will face a “really difficult choice”. 

But, as environmental harm becomes ever more visible, the profession is likely to face increasing pressure. Meanwhile lawyers – whether they’re young graduates, for whom eco-activism is a given, or long-established professionals thinking of their children’s future – will find more opportunities to deploy their skills. Nor can the reality of what’s happening outside be ignored for too much longer, Montlake suggests. Lawyers, after all, “are people who exist in the world”.