May Day was D-Day for A&O Shearman, the newly minted Anglo-American colossus that came into being this week. Just don’t call the firm ‘magic circle’.
I visited A&O Shearman’s London office on Wednesday for a party; but the revels had nothing to do with toasting transatlantic legal practice. Lawyers and other assorted wellwishers had come to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the London Legal Support Trust, begetter of the London Legal Walk.
The LLW has raised £10.5m for free legal advice agencies in London and the south-east since its foundation in 2005, and will continue in that noble cause. Do sign up for June’s perambulation if you’re local and haven’t done so already.
The Gazette will certainly be there, though the number of us who try and run (at least some of) it has diminished as the years have accumulated.
Lest the Gazette be accused of capital-centricity, I should also commend the many regional legal walks that take place each summer across Britain. Unlike the London Legal Walk, they are organised by the Access to Justice Foundation, which has announced a change in its charitable award policy this year.
The foundation is no longer committing to distributing funds in the region in which they were raised, but will itself decide which are the most deserving good causes.
‘This will help us make grants on a more equitable basis to help people in areas of the UK that do not have active and generous legal communities,’ the foundation tells me. Only a ‘handful of queries’ have been raised about the change, it says.
The shift in policy seems to make sense, disappointing though it may be for some walkers not (necessarily) to be benefiting their own locales. Previously, the foundation has also given walkers the option to nominate a charity for their donation. Last year this meant that of the total raised, the foundation collected, processed and sent £30,000 to 27 nominated charities. Eleven of those received £100 or less.
Every little helps, of course, but there has to be a better way.
Overall, the Access to Justice Foundation has distributed £20m to 42 charities so far this year and is about to announce further awards totalling £7.4m. Do your bit by ‘stepping out’ this summer – wherever you may be.
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