RPC Employment Surgery
On 22nd November 2016 Patrick Brodie, Head of RPC’s Employment, Pensions and Incentives practice, volunteered his time to provide much needed legal advice to three East London charities. We spoke to Patrick immediately after the event to hear his thoughts on the volunteering experience.
1) Patrick, you have just finished a volunteering session during which you supported three East London Charities to tackle a key employment based issue that they are currently facing. What are your immediate thoughts/reflections on the session?
“Valuable. Interesting partly because we exist as an organization, we exist as a law firm and we actually exist on the edges of Tower Hamlets, but St. Katherine’s Dock is a bubble. We operate in a bubble which is a bubble that is more aligned to The City in many ways as opposed to a community which is on our doorstep. It is a community that is doing brilliant stuff. I think that there are so many people who operate in these boundaries of The City and Tower Hamlets who don’t engage. Just sitting in a room and talking to ELBA’s Community Partners about what they do and how they do it, I am struck by the brilliance of these people. These are people who are genuinely interested in what they are doing and they are genuinely putting their hands out to help other people. Having the opportunity to support in this way is great”.
2) You are a Senior Partner at RPC with an extremely busy schedule. Why did you choose to volunteer your time today?
“We all give up our time, we all give it up in different ways doing different things and you can’t operate alone as an organisation or as an individual. A corporate is a community of people with a community of interests and so often we might be inwardly looking, thinking and being concerned about ourselves, but every so often you look up from the desk and you just wonder what everyone else is doing. If you can help in a little way, then I think that that’s a useful thing”.
3) What advice would you give to someone who is considering volunteering?
“Go for it! Do it! I think that somehow within it you gain and you don’t always gain what you think you might do, but you gain something else, something different and more often than not it will be better. If you don’t volunteer you will never know what you missed out on”.
