Increasingly, questions related to environmental, social, and governance issues—known collectively as ESG—underpin operations affecting organizations across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. This is true whether you are a real estate investment trust looking to measure corporate disclosure on environmental and social issues or a hospitality company incorporating ESG-based KPIs into your pricing structure. It is true whether you are a global beverage company calculating and disclosing the climate footprint of your products or a bank holding company in search of advice on ESG disclosures. And it is true whether you are dealing with environmental auditing, supply chain transparency, brownfields, green building design, greenhouse gas emissions, energy permitting, waste reduction, or conflict minerals.
Understanding how to parse and pursue these issues on behalf of clients, and navigate related risks, requires a multidisciplinary, multipractice approach. Any one engagement can draw on environmental attorneys as well as those in the corporate or securities practices. It can involve attorneys and policy advisors dedicated to finance, IP, labor, health care, land use, and even litigation.
What unites them all here at Alston & Bird is our overarching, insightful view of the emerging ESG landscape, from new and proposed regulations to federal and state enforcement actions, from shareholder proposals to employee concerns—with monitoring enhanced by the firm’s ESG Tracker. With these elements, this commitment to teamwork, and the comprehensive ESG knowledge we use to filter our clients’ matters, Alston & Bird’s ESG Advisory Group is able to take a unique approach to the services we provide, one that is both customized and strategic, focused on helping clients figure out—and communicate—an ESG path that will best meet their specific needs.
Corporate executives and directors worldwide tell us that ESG is central to their business strategies, an importance integral to our strategic legal advice. Consumers indicate that they already factor ESG into their consumption and employment decisions. At Alston & Bird, we take ESG as seriously as these executives and consumers, helping our clients across the globe develop legal strategies and business policies that are not only compliant but competitive, satisfying not only regulators but also investors, shareholders, employees, and consumers.