Dentons was honoured to be recognized at the 2021 Canada Law Awards for Pro Bono Initiative of the Year, commending the Firm’s efforts on a pro bono mandate to address violence against women in the workplace.

The Canada Law Awards is an annual industry award program open to all Canada-based law firms and law departments. This award competition was based on the impact of a pro bono initiative and its contribution to positively influence society and the communities we call home.

Background

In 2020, at the request of the Kering Foundation, the Thomson Reuters Foundation and Led By HER, with UN Women as a partner, Dentons Canada, under the leadership of Ottawa-based counsel Catherine Coulter, worked with colleagues across five other global jurisdictions to help create a report on best practices and policies for addressing domestic violence in and related to the workplace.

About the project

Following this work, the Firm assisted UN Women with the development of toolkits designed to be used by companies around the world in order to implement the UN Women Empowerment Principles (WEPs) in combating gender violence and harassment in the workplace, and promoting gender responsive procurement. The Pro Bono Initiative of the Year was the creation of both a Gender-Based Violence and Harassment at Work Policy and Procedure template, as well as a Domestic Violence at Work Policy and Procedure template, which were created by Catherine.  Built upon the earlier research performed for the Kering Report, these templates will soon be made available to thousands of companies around the world which are signatories to the UN WEPs. On a related note, Anca Sattler, counsel in the Dentons office in Ottawa, created a similar Gender Responsive Procurement Policy template for UN Women.

“It is my privilege that as part of my job I get to do work that is helping to protect and advance women around the world,” said Catherine. “With thanks to my colleagues and industry partners in Canada and around the world, employers can access tools that better equip them with understanding of the supports required by women who are or may be subjected to domestic or sexual violence, as well as scalable template documents that they can roll out in their workplaces to help protect their female employees.”

To learn more about how Dentons is making a difference across its communities, please visit our Pro Bono in Canada webpage.