Overview

ESG makes good business sense

ESG impacts day-to-day operations, investment, risk management, reporting, finance and corporate responsibility for organisations of all sizes, at all stages in their lifecycle.

Stakeholders – whether clients, customers, regulators, investors, governments, NGOs, shareholders or employees – make judgements on your business based on what you articulate about your approach to ESG factors, and the way you measure and deliver it.

Our ESG expertise

Burges Salmon provides strategic and operational support both in managing ESG risks and in realising the opportunities that arise from the ESG agenda.

Using our market-leading ESG expertise across our business, we have developed practical tools such as our ESG Risk Review, ESG Pensions Tool, ESG Corporate Disclosure Tool and our Modern Slavery Statement Compliance Check to simplify the complex and help you understand your ESG priorities and responsibilities and to deliver on your ESG ambitions.

Asking the right ESG questions

We can help you ask the right questions, establishing what ESG really means for your business, and how we can help you achieve real value from it.

  • Understanding and prioritising your responsibilities – ESG is a multi-faceted space. Applying our broad expertise and connected approach, we will help you consider the context in which your ESG priorities sit – do the environmental, social and governance strands overlap? What are the potential complexities and conflicts? Who is responsible for managing the ESG elements in your business?
  • Keeping your business safe – We will help you understand your regulatory requirements, establishing compliant due diligence and efficient auditing procedures, drafting contracts, and reviewing procurement and supply-chain processes, minimising risk to your reputation and shareholder value.
  • Enabling you to maximise the ESG opportunities – We will work with you to identify upcoming regulation and market forces, defining and interrogating strategies to turn them to your advantage and helping you with knowledge planning, to ensure you are always proactive in your ESG methodology.

It’s not just what we do, it’s who we are 

Authenticity is part of what sets us apart. We have been independently assessed by EcoVadis across a broad spectrum of ESG criteria, achieving their Gold Sustainability Standard for being ranked in the top 5% of participating organisations globally.

This recognition reflects our longstanding commitment to being a responsible business. We were one of the first legal firms to establish a dedicated Environment team 30 years ago, and many of our people are founding members of ESG initiatives, such as the Social Mobility Business Partnership and Legal Sustainability Alliance. We’re also active participants and speakers at prominent ESG events.

A longstanding commitment and a long-term perspective

With an enduring commitment to being a responsible business, ESG is central to our business philosophy at Burges Salmon and is reflected in how all of our advice is delivered. We have a genuinely caring culture: for you and the success of your business, for the people in our teams, and for the world around us.

Areas of focus

Our services cover the full spectrum of ESG considerations, including:

Environment

Social

Governance

Experience

Advising a large transport group on template clauses to be used in their supply contracts.

Advising a variety of organisations on Greenwashing.

Advising various clients including Virgin Limited Edition,Derwent London and Seabank Power on their compliance with Modern Slavery requirements.

Advising an educational charity with significant landholdings on developing its ESG strategy and assisting with implementation of the strategy. This included providing list of ESG laws for compliance purposes and considering its retrofit strategy for 5,00 homes.

Advising Kinetic Capital on a £39m loan facility which will finance the development of student accommodation in Nottingham. The transaction is also the first in Kinetic’s ESG programme, through which the lender offers financial incentives for borrowers to deliver on pre-agreed ESG objectives with a focus on initiatives that support the mental health and wellbeing of students.

Advising a French fashion house on its ESG compliance including advising the Board on climate change risk reporting.

Advising a private equity fund on ESG risks arising from the acquisition of a target operating in a sensitive market, including assisting the fund in understanding the rapidly evolving regulatory regime for the target's business.

Advising trustees on risk mitigation strategies in cases where they are asked to invest a high percentage, or the totality, of trust assets in ESG investments.

Reviewing a local authority pension fund’s policies on investment and ESG and advising on a response to an international charity in the context of overseas investment.

Advising fund managers on their ESG policies and communications.

Advising Blue Gem Wind on all aspects of its 96MW floating wind demonstration project, Erebus.

Advising Bristol City Council in respect of the City Leap Energy Partnership, a transformative and innovative project to procure a strategic partner to develop, construct and own a number of energy and infrastructure opportunities to facilitate the council’s ambition of Bristol being a carbon neutral city by 2030.

Advising Progressive Energy and Cadent on the flagship Hynet North West Carbon Capture and Storage and hydrogen cluster project in relation to CO2 aspects and pipelines as well as other participants in all Government led CCUS commercialisation competitions to date.

Advising M&S on the award winning community energy scheme, M&S Energy Society, which involves the purchase by M&S of renewable electricity generated by solar panels installed on its stores across the UK, with the generating infrastructure being financed by members of community energy organisation Energy4All.

Advising the developer of a plant which will convert local NHS hospital clinical waste into clean energy.

Advising developers, local authorities, funders and customers on low carbon heat networks and solutions.

Advising Progressive Energy and ENI on consenting, real estate matters and regulatory matters for a new carbon dioxide carbon capture linked to hydrogen production and carbon capture as part of HyNet (the market leading blue hydrogen project in the north west) and for Progressive Energy in relation to the corporate and commercial arrangements for its JV with Essar for hydrogen production.

Advised Bluefield Solar Income Fund (BSIF), a longstanding client, on its innovative £112.4 million acquisition of a 93.2MWp UK-based solar and wind portfolio, bringing its total portfolio of assets to 766MWp.

Advising Total and Simply Blue on the Erebus floating wind project of the coast of Wales which is heralded to be 96 megawatts of floating wind. When established it will be the largest floating wind project in the UK.

Advising Xlinks Limited on the UK aspects of its ambitious, first-of-a-kind, nationally significant energy project linking renewable power generated in Morocco to the UK via 3,800km of HVDC sub-sea cables.

Advising UKAEA as principal legal advisor in relation to the development of the UK’s flagship nuclear fusion project, the Spherical Tokomak for Energy Production or ‘STEP Project’ which aims to deliver a prototype nuclear fusion energy plant in 2040. This technology is of huge national and global significance as it is currently the leading project globally seeking to demonstrate the commercial viability of fusion technology which has been described as the ‘holy grail’ of energy.

Advising Severn Trent Water on regulatory and real estate rights issues in relation to the Mansfield Green Recovery project.

Advised Eunomia as part of a project to assess ways to encourage and finance the retrofit of properties with energy efficiency measures as measures as part of the U.K.’s drive towards net zero.

Meet the team
Michael Barlow

Michael Barlow Partner

  • Head of Environment
  • Head of Water
  • Head of ESG
Sarah Raby

Sarah Sackville Hamilton (Sarah Raby) Senior Associate

  • Projects
  • Energy and Utilities 
  • Environment 
Ian Truman

Ian Truman Partner

  • Nuclear
  • Projects
  • Environment
Joanne Attwood

Joanne Attwood Consultant

  • Head of Licensing
  • Environment
  • Water
Jamie Cameron

Jamie Cameron Director

  • Employment
  • Business Immigration Services
  • Employment Disputes
Kate Granville-Smith

Kate Granville Smith Director

  • Pensions Services
Malcolm Donald Web Profile

Malcolm Donald Partner

  • Mergers and Acquisitions
  • Joint Ventures
  • Energy and Utilities
Amy McVey

Amy McVey Director

  • Banking and Finance 
  • Corporate Restructuring and Insolvency
  • Real Estate Finance 
Tom Dunn

Tom Dunn Partner

  • Head of Regulated Funds and Financial Services
  • Regulated Funds
  • Financial Services

What others say...

Burges Salmon environmental team are well known for expertise across a wide range of environmental sectors: nuisance, industrial pollution, environmental regulation, planning, environmental assessment.

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