The Chancery Lane Project (CLP) is a collaborative of UK lawyers working to develop new contracts and model laws to help fight climate change. Its mission is to create contracts and model laws to enable communities and businesses to fight climate change and achieve net zero carbon emissions for a 1.5 degree world. The first editions of the Climate Contract Playbook and Green Papers of Model Laws were published in February 2020 following a successful legal hackathon.
This re-alignment of traditional corporate targets with broader societal and environmental targets will be a key tool in the fight for a more sustainable climate.
Travers Smith's first CLP project – namely the production of a template management equity ratchet term for inclusion in investment documents to financially incentivise management teams to meet targets which are linked to climate and environmental issues as opposed to purely financial targets – was included in CLP's 2nd Edition of the Climate Contract Playbook.
Travers Smith's involvement in The Big Hack 2020 resulted in the creation of ESG based performance conditions for employee incentive awards (Scarlett's Performance Conditions) which have been published by CLP as part of their precedent bank.
As part of CLP's 2021 events series, we drafted a precedent board paper with detailed prompts for consideration of the climate impacts of a significant contract/transaction and the associated climate risks to the business. Griff's clause has been included in CLP's 'best in class' Net Zero Toolkit, which is a legal blueprint to enable organisations to align themselves with a decarbonised economy.
Our clauses have been included in CLP's publications and downloaded over 60,000 times.
