There’s a rising interest in corporate ESG initiatives as more and more corporations and their stakeholders realize that aligning business practices with employee, customer and community values is ultimately in the best interest of the company. Leading legal teams are hard at work exploring possible roles they can play in creating and supporting initiatives centered around employee and community well-being, economic and environmental accountability, and racial justice reforms.

While some companies define their ESG agenda by identifying the standards below which they cannot fall, other companies – including Microsoft, Starbucks and Golden State Foods, who have been demonstrating their higher values as a priority and a leadership requirement for decades – are asking not how low can we go, but how high can we fly?

While a CEO can speak about corporate values, the successful implementation and realization of those values is often driven by the CLO and the legal team – both in defining projects for their department, as well as leading teams across the larger enterprise. This program brings together leading CLOs to discuss how they made ESG and related accountability initiatives a foundational component of their values-based leadership style and a distinguishing means for attracting and then engaging the best talent, who then work harder to assure the right results.