Legal Issues and Challenges facing Social Entrepreneurs

This seminar was part of the the Skoll World Forum's Orange Programme which offered a series of informal satellite meetings hosted by delegates. It gave an opportunity for delegates to engage with emerging ideas, approaches and innovations directly from the social entrepreneurship community.

David Roll, whom Vivian met last year, (and who has already given organised pro bono advice for one of our own social entrepreneurs John Stansfield) led the session. He is the founder of Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation. It's parent body Lex Mundi which has been operating for 20 years. It is a business network of 160 top tier independent commercial law firms with 500 offices world wide and employ over 16,000 lawyers.

The Foundation was set up in 2006 and is run by David Roll. I asked him what motivated him to give up his day job to do this work. His uncomplicated reply was that he wanted to "do something worthwhile"! The Lex Mundi Foundation has purposefully built relationships with organisations like Ashoka and Schwab. Skoll Foundation has just become their latest collaborator http://www.lexmundiprobono.org/

To date they have engineered 260 matches between social entrepreneurs and legal advisers. The Foundation's aim is to become one of the world's premier pro bono legal services organisations.

At the moment they are focusing on social entrepreneurship, but would like to broaden their horizons. Their future plans are :

• Establishment of the rule of law in developing countries
• legal reform
• judicial reform
• legal eduction and training for lawyers in developing countries
• anti-corruption initiatives

I particularly like the last one. It would be a great help in India!

David was keen to get more applications to the Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation.

http://www.lexmundiprobono.org/