The nature of our work means we often find ourselves creating a path through unexplored territory. This is a good thing, as being innovative is an important part of what we bring to our clients. But it creates challenges: how do we make sure our people have the confidence to try new things? And how do we encourage innovation while expecting technical excellence and ensuring prudence?
In response to the first question, we believe in creating an open working environment where there is room for honest mistakes, and where people understand that learning from them is part of being an innovative firm. To help that, junior lawyers share offices with senior lawyers and work within high standards of supervision.
As for the second question, maintaining the quality of our work means checking everything meticulously before it goes to a client, creating a culture of consultation, having an “open door” policy and providing for peer review whenever it is needed.
In practice
A two-way dialogue
To foster an open working culture, all our people need the opportunity to feed back their views on our leadership, culture and working environment – including their opinions on how we could improve.
We encourage this through informal and formal feed back – like our business services culture survey, which we completed in the first half of 2008.
"Town hall" meetings
Recently, we have stepped up the frequency and reach of our internal communications. For example, Executive Committee members are hosting "town hall" meetings with our people to discuss current challenges.
Innovation awards
In recognition of our global career development programme for associates, we won the award for Innovation in Human Resources at the FT Innovative Lawyers Awards 2008. In 2007, we also won the FT Award for Innovation in Legal Expertise for our work on The GAVI Fund.
Finding a solution for The GAVI Fund
On 7 November 2006, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer launched the £2.1 billion International Finance Facility for Immunisation programme (IFFIm).
The aim of the programme was to immunise 500 million children in up to 70 of the world’s poorest countries over the next decade. It would be funded by the innovative use of the capital markets to raise immediate funds for the immunisation programme and to maximise the impact of government-backed bonds. The hope was that the programme could save five million children’s lives by 2015 and a further five million lives thereafter.
A cross-practice and multi-jurisdictional team of lawyers from Linklaters advised The GAVI Fund (the financing arm of The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) – in relation to IFFIm. For over two and a half years we played a role in structuring, implementing and successfully executing the scheme, as well as drafting the majority of the key transaction documents.