You may have seen our press release about how Buckles Law recently achieved B Corp certification, but let me be upfront about something. When we started the certification process, I didn’t know whether we’d pass.
Not because I doubted our values, as I’ve never doubted those, but because B Corp doesn’t take your word for anything. You can claim anything you want within reason in press releases and on webpages, but B Corp asks you to prove your claims, question by question, across every dimension of how you run your business. And that’s exactly why it matters.
B Corp certification is awarded by B Lab, a global non-profit that assesses businesses against rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, governance, employee welfare and community impact. The B Impact Assessment runs to 200 questions and can take up to 18 months to complete. Fewer than 1% of UK law firms have achieved it at the time of writing.
We have. And I want to explain why we pursued it, what it genuinely involved, and what I think it means for our people, our clients, our business and the direction of travel for this profession.
Why we did it
There’s a version of this story where B Corp certification is a marketing exercise, but that version isn’t ours. We pursued it because we wanted an independent framework that would hold us accountable, not to our own stated ambitions, or values dreamt up by the senior management board, but to an external standard we hadn’t written ourselves.
As COO, my role sits at the intersection of strategy, operations and people. I’ve spent years on our ESG Group and chairing our Innovation Committee and a pattern I’ve seen repeatedly is that commitments without structure tend to drift. The B Corp process gave us structure.
It forced us to look honestly at where we were strong, where we had work to do, and where we needed to change. This kind of honest self-assessment isn’t comfortable, but it’s the only kind worth doing.
What the process actually involved
The assessment examines your business in granular detail, across governance, workers, community, environment and customers. Every area is scored and nothing is taken on faith.
Our strongest scores came in Governance, Workers and Environment. The Governance score of 10.8 out of a possible 11.5, reflects our approach to mission, engagement, ethics and transparency. For a law firm, that’s the score that means most.
We understand that our clients trust us with things that matter enormously to them. The idea that we could verify and demonstrate the ethical foundations of how we operate, not just assert them, is something I’m genuinely proud of.
On Workers, the assessment highlighted our approach to financial security, healthcare and specifically, health benefits extended to part-time employees. That last point matters to me. A firm’s culture isn’t just reflected in how it treats its full-time senior staff. It shows up in the details and the part-time benefits question is a detail that tells a real story.
What it means in practice
B Corp isn’t a certificate you hang on the wall like an award win, which can just be a snapshot in time. This requires an annual impact report and recertification every three years, with the expectation that scores improve each cycle. That’s a significant ongoing commitment, and we’ve deliberately accepted it.
We’ve also joined the Better Business Act, a campaign led by B Lab UK calling for Section 172 of the Companies Act to be amended, so every UK business is legally required to consider how it impacts workers, communities and the environment alongside shareholder returns.
More than 3,000 businesses have backed it and we believe the standard we’ve chosen to meet voluntarily should eventually apply to each one, across every sector.
Why this is the right time
We recognise the legal sector is changing, with a new generation of lawyers and professionals joining the workforce who want to work for businesses whose values align with their own, whilst clients increasingly want advisers they can trust on ethical grounds, not just for their technical acumen. And the regulatory direction of travel, across ESG reporting and corporate governance, is only moving one way.
B Corp certification is our commitment that Buckles is moving with it; deliberately, measurably and for the long term. We didn’t do this to look good. We did it because it was the right thing to do and because we intend to keep proving it.
