Q&A: Alisa White ’22 on How Elite Law Firms Exacerbate Climate Change
In spring 2020, a group of seven Yale Law School students founded an outside organization, Law Students for Climate Accountability (LSCA), dedicated to holding the legal industry accountable for its role in global climate change. In October, the group made national headlines with the release of its “2020 Law Firm Climate Change Scorecard.” The scorecard, the first of its kind for the legal industry, details the role of one hundred top U.S. law firms in the climate crisis and assigns each of the firms a climate score — ranging from A to F — based on analysis of the firms’ litigation, transactional and lobbying work. Yale Law School Law, Ethics & Animals Program Student Fellow Alisa White ’22 / YSE ’23, is one of LSCA’s cofounders and one of the report’s lead authors. LEAP Editorial Associate Jack McCordick BA ’22, spoke with White about her work with the organization and on the scorecard.
There was a group of us at Yale Law School who had been talking about climate activism and thinking about our unique role as law students in the climate movement. Shortly after we began these discussions, we got in touch with some organizers at Harvard Law who kicked off the “Drop Exxon” campaign, protesting a Paul Weiss recruiting event in January and launching a boycott of Paul Weiss until they drop Exxon Mobil as a client. In February, Paul Weiss came for a similar recruiting event at Yale and we organized a similar protest. The reason we picked Paul Weiss is that, as the Law Firm Climate Change Scorecard confirms, they’re one of the firms that is doing the most climate litigation on behalf of Exxon Mobil and on behalf of fossil fuel companies in general. They worked on over 20 cases to support the fossil fuel industry against the public, from 2015 to 2019 alone. We said to Paul Weiss at the protest: “as long as you work for Exxon, we won’t work for you.” We wanted to show law firms that law students care about this issue and we care about factoring it into our careers. Around 40 law students participated in that protest, many of whom were 1Ls whom Paul Weiss was trying to recruit. Since YLS is only a 200-person class, that’s a pretty substantial number.
However, Paul Weiss is just one of many prestigious firms. At the time of the protest, we knew that other big law firms were also working for the fossil fuel industry, but there was no single database or report out there that could tell us what different firms were doing to support the fossil fuel industry. After the protest, we formed Law Students for Climate Accountability to better understand to what extent elite law firms are supporting the fossil fuel industry and to increase pressure on law firms to drop fossil fuel clients. Overall, the Paul Weiss event was the catalyst for a broader movement focused on holding the legal industry accountable for its role in the climate crisis. Prior to this movement, law firms have largely escaped scrutiny for all the work they do for the fossil fuel industry. We are striving to change that.
For our Law Firm Climate Change Scorecard, released in October 2020, we started gathering data in February 2020 and from March through September we developed the methodology, compiled and cleaned the data, and put together the whole report. It was really a great team effort. We strove to make sure the Scorecard was done in a rigorous manner, that we had gathered as much data as we could, and that we had really thought through the methodology — incorporating feedback from the team and outside perspectives.
With recent divestment campaigns and worldwide protests, many industries are going through a long-overdue reckoning with their complicity with the fossil fuel industry. But you argue in the report that the legal industry has largely escaped scrutiny of the many ways it contributes to exacerbating climate change. Why do you think that is?
As you mentioned, we’re finally hitting a critical point where there’s a lot of climate activism around not only the fossil fuel industry itself but also the other industries that are integral to the continued success and operation of the fossil fuel industry. Our work is definitely inspired by divestment campaigns and research into industries like advertising and PR that support the fossil fuel industry. We see the legal industry as the glue that holds the fossil fuel industry together. As we found in our report, the legal industry profits off of climate change by supporting fossil fuel companies at every turn — lobbying in government for fossil fuel interests, supporting fossil fuel financing and transactions, and defending the industry in court — all for substantial profits.
However, I think it has taken a long time to address the role of the legal industry in the climate crisis because there is a strong rhetoric about neutrality in the law that permeates legal education and portrays the lawyer as a neutral actor. Law firms and individuals have responded to our report along the lines of: “lawyers are neutral, just taking whatever business comes to them, that’s what it means to be a lawyer and defend the rule of law.” But we’re pushing back on that. It is hardly neutral for a law firm to choose to represent the fossil fuel industry as a lobbyist in Washington D.C., or to advise the financing of the Dakota Access Pipeline, or to help shield fossil fuel companies from accountability in court. These are choices made by elite law firms to turn a profit at the expensive of our planet and people’s lives around the world.
In addition, some lawyers defend their representation of fossil fuel industry by comparing the fossil fuel industry to a criminal defendant without access to counsel. Unlike criminal defendants, fossil fuel companies in civil cases do not have a constitutional right to counsel. Furthermore, fossil fuel companies already have extensive access to representation—they have dozens and dozens of in-house lawyers, and in addition they hire some of the most prestigious law firms to tip the scales in their favor. Deciding to take on a fossil fuel client does not advance access to representation — especially when there are millions of people every year who go through the courts without any representation at all. Beyond litigation, law firms are doing extensive lobbying and transactional work for the fossil fuel industry — no one has a right to a lobbyist or a right to build a pipeline.
What are the report’s major findings? And what kinds of reactions have you received in the weeks since you published it?
The report has two main findings. First, the 100 most prestigious firms in the United States are doing five to 10 times more work to exacerbate climate change than to mitigate it. We saw this result across three different categories: litigation (cases exacerbating climate change versus cases seeking to mitigate it), transactional work (work for the fossil fuel industry supporting mergers, project financing, pipelines, etc. versus similar work for the renewable energy industry), and lobbying (for the fossil fuel industry versus the renewable energy industry). The findings were pretty staggering: from 2015 to 2019 alone, the top 100 firms litigated 286 cases exacerbating climate change, supported over $1.3 trillion worth of transactions for the fossil fuel industry, and received $37 million in compensation for fossil fuel industry lobbying. If you look at the Climate Scores we awarded firms, a majority of the firms are receiving a D or an F. This is a testament to the fact that the top 100 firms conduct a disproportionate amount of work to support the fossil fuel industry and exacerbate climate change. There’s a lot of need for improvement.
That being said, our second major finding is that some firms are doing much more to exacerbate the climate crisis than others. For example, there are a couple of firms that get As in our report because they were doing work to support renewable energy and we did not find they were doing work to support the fossil fuel industry from 2015 to 2019, based on the data that we gathered. However, there were a number of firms that got an F, and these firms are doing the most work for the fossil fuel industry, according to the data we gathered.
We’ve had a lot of positive feedback both from the legal industry and from our peers. We’ve had a number of people reach out to us from across different law schools and say that the Scorecard is really helpful. I have friends who are considering working for big law firms — to help pay off debt or for other reasons — but don’t want to work for the firms doing the worst on climate change. Before we released the Law Firm Climate Change Scorecard, there wasn’t an easy way to compare firms on climate. There was no centralized database out there. So we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on how the Scorecard can be used as an informational tool for students and the legal industry. We’ve also heard from a lot of practicing lawyers saying that this kind of Scorecard is long overdue. At the very least, the Scorecard helps law students factor climate change into their employment decisions and informs the general public what the most prestigious law firms are doing to support the fossil fuel industry. However, our larger goal is that the Scorecard can be used to leverage change in the legal industry and pressure law firms to drop fossil fuel clients.
I touched on some of the negative feedback earlier, which has mostly focused on the idea of lawyers as neutral actors and everyone deserving representation. But, as I described earlier, the Scorecard and the goals of Law Students for Climate Accountability do not conflict with access to representation.
As you note in the report, many large firms defend their reputations by pointing to the pro bono work they do. Why in your view is that an unsatisfactory response?
That’s something we have thought a lot about. Yes, there’s a lot of great pro bono work going on out there. However, even for the firms doing the most pro bono work, it’s only about 10 percent of what they do, and for most firms it is even less than that. So even though the pro bono work is great, it’s not the bulk of what firms are doing. A small amount of pro bono climate work does not outweigh extensive representation and support of the fossil fuel industry. In addition, a firm that is representing Exxon, for example, might have a conflict of interest preventing them from taking a pro bono case or pro bono work against Exxon’s interest.
We’ve also gotten some feedback about firms greening their office spaces, and our response is: greening office space is great, but it misses the point of the Scorecard. I would of course love to see more climate pro bono work at firms and green office spaces, but the whole purpose of this movement is to reckon with how deeply entrenched top law firms are in supporting and profiting from the fossil fuel industry in their work.
Along with the report, you also released a Law Firm Climate Responsibility Pledge. In signing the pledge, what is a law firm committing to? And what do you think the prospects are for getting a sizable number of Vault 100 firms to sign the pledge?
The main reason we came up with this pledge is that we wanted to open the door for top law firms to change. A lot of firms have dedicated themselves to fossil fuel work, but that’s not the way it has to be. In addition, we think that firms who take the pledge could gain a competitive advantage over other firms in recruitment. Many students who care about the climate crisis will see that a firm has signed a pledge and may want to work there more than other firms.
The pledge has three key parts. The first commitment is for firms to cease taking on new representation of fossil fuel clients, and that would be effective immediately. The second commitment is that law firms phase out current fossil fuel clients by 2025, which is a rapid timeline but appropriate since we don’t have much time to meaningfully address the climate crisis. Finally, the third commitment is to continue to take on renewable energy work and litigation to fight climate change. We haven’t quantified specifically how much that work should be, but we think a firm should be pledging to commit to some work fighting climate change.
As for the prospects, that’s something we’re still working on. We have begun reaching out to firms and talking to them about the pledge. So it’s an ongoing effort.
In addition to the Law Firm Climate Responsibility Pledge, we also have a Law Student Climate Pledge to gather student support for the movement we’re building. However, we see this movement as putting the pressure on law firms. We realize that various law students have different financial and personal pressures when deciding on career choices. The student pledge isn’t about shaming a student who really needs to pay off their debt or has family they’re trying to support and has to go work at a firm. Since the inception of Law Students for Climate Accountability, we have consistently emphasized that we are not here to shame students. This is about law firms taking on fossil fuel clients — a broader, systemic, industry-wide issue — and we are building student momentum around pressuring firms to drop fossil fuel clients. This movement is for everyone, whether you want to boycott firms that work for the fossil fuel industry or whether you want to work for a firm and push for more climate-friendly work. There are a lot of ways to go about holding the legal industry accountable for its role in the climate crisis, and we’re sensitive to the personal circumstances of students, given that we are all students too.
If you are interested in getting involved in Law Students for Climate Accountability, send us an email at info@ls4ca.org, sign up for our email list, or follow us on Twitter for updates.
