London lawyers raise £380,000 for charity on sponsored walk

Over 4,000 members of the legal profession, including The Lawyer’s entire editorial team, took part in the annual London Legal Sponsored Walk, a 10k jaunt around central London.

Despite the UK being in recession, the walkers managed to top last year’s fundraising total of £360,000. The money will be used to support the work of social welfare legal centres in London and the Home Counties.

London Legal Support Trust chair Bob Nightingale, who organised the event, said: “This year we set a target of £300,000, which was less than last year, but our estimate is that in fact we’ll have raised £380,000. In hard financial times it’s a credit to the profession.

“During the 14 weeks of organisation, seven organisers were made redundant. It shows the terrible circumstances [in which we were working]. We had one firm announce redundancies on Thursday, but the walkers still came.”

The number of people taking part in the walk increased this year, up from 3,400 last year. Nightingale said that the growing participation was testimony to the fact that, despite the recession, law firms weren’t just looking out for themselves.

“People who are still in jobs know what a hard job poor people are having – and the walk didn’t do us any harm at all,” he said.

The Lawyer editorial team was among those who walked and ran the 10k route, which began at the Royal Courts of Justice and ended at The Law Society building on Chancery Lane. To donate to our team please visit http://www.justgiving.com/thelawyernewsdesk. Thank you for all your donations so far.