In the U.S. and UK, issues relating to ESG risks are expanding and evolving rapidly and continually for commercial entities. Organizations have a part to play in promoting good ESG conduct, but this comes with the responsibility of managing potential liability and litigation. In this podcast, Tom Webley, partner in our Global Commercial Disputes Group in London, Mark Goldstein, partner in our Labor and Employment Group in New York, and Mark Pring, partner in our Insurance Recovery Group in London, discuss topical issues relating to ESG risks and steps directors can take to mitigate these risks in both the UK and U.S. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Welcome to Disputes and Perspective, a Reed Smith podcast. This podcast series will discuss disputes related trends, hot topics and developments occurring in the global legal landscape, and hopefully provide you with some helpful insights and practical tips. If you have any questions about any of the episodes, please feel free to contact our speakers. Mark P: Welcome back, everyone, to Disputes in Perspective. My name is Mark Pring and I'm a partner in our global commercial disputes and insurance recovery teams. I'm delighted to be joined by my partners and colleagues, Mark Goldstein, a labor and employment lawyer in our New York office, and Tom Webley, a commercial disputes and regulatory lawyer in our London office with extensive experience, particularly in the financial services sector. In this short podcast, we'll be addressing some topical issues relating to disputes arising out of ESG risks. We think it's fair to say that people have long been aware of the risk of litigation in the ESG context, but we're starting to sense that the litigation landscape and indeed the regulatory landscape is changing in a number of jurisdictions, including the UK and the US in relation to litigation. The focus of attention previously was on class action claims against the likes of polluters and governments directly responsible for environmental damage or impacts on communities, but now there are myriad other risk exposures. Tom, if we can start with you. Do you get the sense that the UK risk landscape is changing? Tom: I do. Mark, I mean, I think it's not just changing, but it's fair to say that in relation to ESG risks and litigation risks, it's probably expanding and expanding quite rapidly and continually. You mentioned that a lot of the previous claims were against what we probably could look at as primary infringes. So for example, anyone who's directly responsible for any pollution or emissions or environmental harm. But that certainly isn't what we are seeing claims limited to now and probably increasingly so, ESG and particularly the E. So if we think about climate change, this is seen as something for which all commercial entities have some sort of responsibility to drive change for the good, to improve their own conduct in their own performance in that sphere. And I think the net result of that is likely to be an increased amount of claims against a much wider range of potential defendants, almost to the point where actually any single commercial entity could be in the firing line. And if we take an example of how this has manifested in practice, you could look at the action that's been taken by organizations like ClientEarth. You may well be aware a lot of people will. That client brought a claim against directors of Shell. Again, that's much more focused on the more primary infringer type claims, but they've also been writing to wider organizations like trustees of pension funds, reminding those trustees that people investing money also have an obligation to the wider community to ensure that the investments drive change in a positive way. So that's an example of the expansion away from the original target for those claims into something completely different. And it's likely not just to be pension funds and the asset managers and people with large amounts of money to inve