Our projects and programmes

Since our launch in July 2010, over 300 teams of lawyers around the world have already responded to our members' call for assistance. Below are just some examples of these projects and programmes.

Apply for membership or get in touch if you are a lawyer interested in working on similar projects or an NGO or social enterprise that could benefit from similar types of assistance.

Programmes

Transparency International (TI) is a global civil society organisation leading the fight against corruption. One of TI's key activities is to support the civil society review of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC). The review process is undertaken by both governments and civil society organisations (CSOs) to ensure the effective implementation of UNCAC in the 148 countries where the treaty has been ratified.

Law firm Mayer Brown has successfully coordinated a team of 19 law firms to produce these reports for TI's coalition of CSOs as part of the first of the review cycles to strengthen the review process.
Mission Investors Exchange help philanthropic foundations achieve their goals through innovative ‘programme related investments’ (PRIs). PRIs allow foundations and other philanthropic organizations to move beyond traditional grant-making and deploy a wide range of financial tools thus promoting innovation and improving the flow of funding to NGOs and social enterprises.

Linklaters has compiled a guide for Mission Investors Exchange that clarifies the legal considerations involved with making PRIs in the United States. This guide, the first of a series designed to assist the burgeoning field of impact investing, should be of particular interest to Foundations, but equally useful for organizations trying to access new sources of financial support.
TrustLaw works with hundreds of social entrepreneurs who use both for-profit and non-profit approaches to solving social problems. We know that when they launch their projects and as they grow their organisations, they need guidance on the different legal and tax frameworks that can guide their work.

Morrison and Foerster has compiled user friendly guides for those based in the UK and US. Each guide clearly outlines key strategic considerations and regulatory and tax implications of different structures available and will allow social entrepreneurs to find more easily the structure that will allow them to maximize their impact.

For those organisations that have decided that the charity or non-profit route is the right one for them, we have put together two additional guides to guide them through the registration process in the US and UK.
San Andres University is working to raise awareness of the costs of corruption and to bring about policy reform in Argentina. As part of their research, they asked TrustLaw to bring together leading firms from all over the world to study how the legal profession deals with corruption in each of those countries and how it can play a role in facilitating or preventing it. Over 15 law firms, led by Arnold and Porter, have contributed to the research, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, England, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Pakistan, UAE and the US.

Projects

Friends-International is a social enterprise that started in August 1994 in Phnom Penh
(Cambodia) in response to the lack of services for street children and youth and has been developing a range of interlinked programs around the world ever since. Friends-International has asked for advice regarding international intellectual property rights and assistance protecting their organisation against the threats of copy-cats.
The Gaia Amazon Fund promotes governance and environmental stewardship in the Northwest Amazon, empowering the local indigenous population through the preservation of bio- and cultural diversity. With the existing mining code in Colombia declared unconstitutional, Gaia Amazon Fund was keen for legal assistance to research the status of the current code and review the rights of indigenous people to be consulted regarding any amendments to it.
mDiagnostica envisages a future where everyone has access to healthcare services, and sees mobile health technology as a tool that will help bridge the gap. The organisation does this by delivering accessible, affordable healthcare to under-served populations around the world to help achieve this, for example through an open source platform to connect rural doctors with specialists so that they can provide diagnoses for rural patients.
J Sagar Associates and HP are helping mDiagnostica with advice on regulatory, privacy and liability issues to scale up these systems and provide remote medical diagnostic services on a state-wide basis throughout Kerala, India.
Urban Harmony, which has developed sustainable vertical wall gardens to promote well being and create more natural greenery in urban areas, was connected with a legal team to assist with the protecting of their intellectual property rights, as well as provide advice relating to the importing of natural materials from Brazil.
FYSE's mission is to inspire, connect and accelerate social entrepreneurs, with a focus on high-impact women entrepreneurs in the Asia Pacific region. A lawyer from Jun He designed and ran a legal workshop for a group of women in the early stages of starting their own social enterprises in Beijing, to enable them to register and manage their enterprise.