We create more sustainable solutions

Corporate responsibility

All of our activities are founded on responsibility. The Finnish Bar Association is a public corporation regulated by the Advocates Act, which promotes the availability of independent, professional and ethically impeccable legal services for every Finnish citizen – regardless of income or place of residence.

To us, responsibility means not only improving the judicial conditions in Finland, but also setting an example for responsible operations. We also support certain permanent partners, such as Amnesty International, with free visibility and campaigns.

Social responsibility

Keeping Finland just and equal is important to us. To this end, when the regular work days of our voluntary attorneys-at-law end, they start writing the long statements required by the thorough drafting of legislation. Legislation is busy work, and the expert teams of the Finnish Bar Association do their part to eliminate gaps from the legislative bills passed by Parliament and ensure that all perspectives have been taken into account in them.

Volunteer work

Our attorneys-at-law do volunteer work in many projects related to social responsibility, participating actively in projects coordinated by the Finnish Bar Association in addition to the social responsibility projects of their own law offices.

The audience of Pori Suomi Areena was treated to an unforgettable experience in the summer of 2018, when the Finnish Bar Association’s celebrity volunteer attorneys teamed up with improvisation troupe Stella Polaris for the wildly popular “Exä vai nyxä” mock trial. The intent was to show the public a truthful, if somewhat light-hearted, depiction of what goes on in a trial.

Promoting equality

The promotion of equality is of paramount importance to us: social justice is impossible if every individual is not treated equally in our society. Indeed, the promotion of equality is constantly on our to-do list. Our reaction to the widely publicised #metoo campaign is but one example of this. In June 2018, we published a manual for the prevention of and intervening in sexual harassment for all law offices. We use regular surveys to keep track of how the manual has been received and its guidelines implemented by the offices. And we have also widened our investigations in this area – follow our channels to learn how!

Our best experts at the disposal of society

The Finnish Bar Association contributes to the improvement of judicial conditions in Finland by issuing statements on the legislative and other projects of the Ministry of Justice, the European Union, Parliament and various authorities. As a rule, the Finnish Bar Association’s judicial policy statements are drawn up as volunteer work by the Association’s teams of experts. We have roughly 125 top experts working in our twenty or so expert teams to improve society.

Environmental responsibility

For the planet to remain habitable for future generations, every organisation, company and citizen must do their part to halt climate change. In this regard, our work has only just begun, but we hope to be able to report more concrete results on our own efforts next year. We have already achieved something, however.

Even bees are holding us accountable for ruining the environment. And the Finnish Bar Association is no exception! 

Since the autumn of 2018, we have

• switched the majority of our meetings to teleconferences in order to avoid travel emissions;
• replaced coffee and doughnuts with fruit baskets for shorter meetings at our office;
• preferred salads, vegetarian meals and sustainable fish for meeting lunches;
• preferred public transport, and railways in particular, for all business travel;
• initiated the process of updating our old, paper-intensive association register to provide paperless electronic services to our membership in the future; and
• recycled all IT equipment, favouring organisations of small means that will benefit the most from the equipment.

We aim to join the Green Office network in 2020 or 2021.