Corporate
Responsibility
at RELX

When Ian McDougall became general counsel of LexisNexis, RELX’s legal business, and gained authority for its corporate responsibility, he found a hodge-podge of good works with no coherence. In some cases, there was little relevance to the unit’s actual business of providing a library of legal research, case history and reporting and the analytic tools to sort it out. “Sometimes, it was connected with the rule of law, other times not,” Mr. McDougall said. “I remember that someone had visited the township of Soweto and so was now painting a school there, and I wasn’t sure that was the best use of our skills and capabilities.”

Together with others, Mr. McDougall came up with a simple two-pronged strategy for LexisNexis’ corporate responsibility work. First, it would utilise the core skills of the business, which decidedly did not include painting schools, and work with partners that could bring the company together with society.

LexisNexis knew it had the most to offer in the area of rule of law -- but what did “rule of law” actually mean? “For many people, they come up with their own definition of what the rule of law is,” he said. “In the past, that has mainly meant a lot of smart people sitting around a table trying to define the rule of law.”

So LexisNexis did extensive research to come up with a definition that would encompass long standing, apolitical, universal elements, delving into historic texts like the Magna Carta and Upanishad (ancient Sanskrit texts dealing with moral issues), to guide the deployment of its expertise and skills to enhance and uphold the rule of law.

Its most obvious asset was legal publishing, and it began doing projects to consolidate laws and make them more available in places where access to legal documentation was limited. In Sierra Leone, for instance, there was only one set of law books in the entire country after its civil war ended in 2002.

LexisNexis scanned the books to create an electronic database of the country’s laws and made it available to the judiciary in Sierra Leone. “It wasn’t a complicated project, but it was fundamental to the administration of justice in that country,” Mr. McDougall said.

Together with the International Bar Association (IBA), LexisNexis helped build and create an app to help document and record human rights violations. “If you look at YouTube and various other things, there is no shortage of video evidence of bad things happening,” Mr. McDougall said. “But that video evidence is largely not admissible in court, particularly the International Criminal Court, because there’s no way of verifying it and showing its provenance.”

The eyeWitness to Atrocities app automatically records the precise date, time and location where a video record is made and encodes the data so that it can’t be changed or altered -- and without leaving any trace on a user’s phone that the app was ever used. Such video can then be uploaded to a repository that can be accessed by human rights lawyers, and in 2018, video obtained via the app was used to help convict two warlords from the Democratic Republic of Congo of crimes against humanity.

“What you can see in that is the use of our technical skills to advance that project, working with the IBA to make a significant advance in the rule of law,” Mr. McDougall said.

Recognising that the rule of law is a cornerstone for sustainable global development, LexisNexis developed the Rule of Law Impact Tracker. Specifically, the tracker quantifies the relationship between rule of law and social and economic development.

Embedding corporate responsibility into the heart of the business has positioned RELX well for the current demand among institutional investors for sustainable bottom lines. So-called socially responsible investment funds like those managed by Domini Impact Investments and Good Capital have for some time prized corporate efforts to reduce environmental footprints, ensure fair labour practices and exhibit strong diversity and inclusion among workforces. But one catalyst that helped drive the ESG (environment, social and governance) agenda higher among analysts and investors was signalling in 2018 by Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager, that the firm would factor a company’s sustainability performance into its investment decisions . “Now, more and more investors are prioritising ESG issues alongside financial metrics,” Dr. Balisciano said.

She noted that many companies have prioritised limiting the impact of their operations on the environment. Since 2015, RELX has achieved cumulative electricity reductions of 99,000 MWh, resulting in avoided energy costs of approximately £9m. RELX is primarily an office-based company, and its carbon emissions are dwarfed by what happens in its supply chain. The company has decreased print as a share of its turnover from 64% per cent in 2000 to just 9% in 2019. But RELX still needs to ensure the paper it does use in its print products comes from known and legal sources. Accordingly, RELX is a founding member of Publisher’s Database for Responsible Paper Sourcing to help understand the sustainability of the paper it buys from tree to mill and eventually, customer.

As a signatory of the Women’s Empowerment Principles, a joint initiative between the UN Global Compact and UN Women, the company is committed to increasing the number of women technologists it hires. It is also working with peers, as a founding member of the Responsible Media Forum, to develop a methodology for understanding its share of energy and carbon from its cloud providers. Some 90 percent of the electricity RELX uses today comes from renewable sources, like wind and solar, as well as renewable energy certificates .

All of this translates into a more robust bottom line at RELX . As Dr. Balisciano noted, corporate responsibility is not a “non-financial” part of business. Today the company integrates reporting about its corporate responsibility performance into its annual reports, and Erik Engstrom, its chief executive, incorporates it in his discussions about risk and governance. In early 2020, the company discussed its ESG achievements as part of its formal financial presentations. Nick Luff, the RELX chief financial officer, who Dr. Balisciano describes as the company’s “most senior environmental champion,” tracks corporate responsibility metrics alongside traditional financial ones.

That’s a sea change from when Dr. Balisciano arrived at RELX to develop a plan for the company to support education for underprivileged children (although she is proud of the fact that the community programme she began then, by 2019 had 45% of employees volunteering in company time, almost double the sector average of 26% according to LBG, formerly the London Benchmarking Group) – but she’s still working to knit corporate responsibility even more tightly into the company’s day-to-day business practices and procedures.

Via a 90-page corporate responsibility report studded with more than 250 data points that is published annually, RELX provides transparent information that helps financial analysts assess the company. Dr. Balisciano said, “Corporate responsibility has moved far beyond a business simply being charitable. It’s about how it does its business and how it maximises its positive impact on society that underscores its financial success.”

“Shareholders and their interests are as important as they always have been, but shareholders, alongside other stakeholders like our customers, employees, governments, and members of civil society, also have an interest in making sure a business will be there for the long-term,” she argued. “There’s no longer a binary choice between being profitable and being a good business -- in order to survive and thrive, companies need to be both. "

“If anything, she said, “the response to the global pandemic has put even more of a spotlight on the importance of corporate responsibility, including how we are using our knowledge to further understanding about the disease and the search for a vaccine.  It’s also about governing well in exceptional circumstances, and being responsive to our people, customers, suppliers and communities during challenging times.  The pandemic has also shown the positive climate effects that can be achieved in a relatively short period. We will need to build on all these things for the period of recovery ahead.”