Earlier this month, our London office held its annual HL BaSE Catalyst workshop, dedicated to supporting social entrepreneurs in collaboration with some of our private sector clients.
Earlier this month, our London office held its bi-annual HL BaSE Catalyst workshop, dedicated to supporting social entrepreneurs in collaboration with some of our private sector clients.
The programme involves an afternoon workshop during where selected social enterprises receive bespoke and confidential legal or business advice from a small team of senior lawyers from the firm and our clients.
Eight multi-disciplinary teams made up of 16 Hogan Lovells volunteers and 9 in-house legal counsel offered bespoke legal support to 8 social enterprises on issues ranging from contract, real estate, corporate, finance and data protection law.
Our innovative social enterprise clients included:
- Kai Pacha Foods: Kai Pacha Foods transforms native quinoa varieties that are in danger of extinction into scalable, sustainable food products, working directly with indigenous high mountain communities in southern Peru to protect agrobiodiversity; and
- Safe & the City: Safe & the City is the only street-smart app to navigate and help shape a smarter and safer London for everyone. They crowdsource user and crime data into a street-navigation tool to help individuals move more safely around the city.
Attending this year's event, Caroline Riddy Senior Counsel from Axa UK PLC, noted: "We just wanted to extend a massive thanks for the opportunity to participate in yesterday’s excellent event. I know that we all found our sessions thoroughly inspiring and refreshing. Seriously impressive for us to see the investment Hogan Lovells have made into such a worthwhile enterprise. Great stuff."
Paul M Loveridge, Senior Legal Counsel at HSBC, also noted "I think Hogan Lovells should be very proud of the work it is delivering through these workshops. It was good to see so many different social enterprises at the event, hear their stories, and to be included in the support from the firm to help to drive them on"
Ben Smith from UnLtd, a HL BaSE partner, also gave an informative presentation on the impactful work that UnLtd has done in this sector.
The HL BaSE Catalyst programme has now been launched in 10 of our offices worldwide. Since its inception we have involved over 70 of our corporate clients in these workshops and provided legal advice to more than 100 social entrepreneurs.
We now look forward to hosting our next HL BaSE Catalyst programmes in our Milan office in July 2019, Birmingham office in September 2019 and Paris office in October 2019.
To find out more about HL BaSE Catalyst please click here.