Our firm’s guiding principles and culture align with the vision of an enterprise with strong social presence and responsibility. Our team is guided by a strong set of values and beliefs, recognizing that culture is a driving and foundational force in any business. We are doing our best to contribute towards a fair, equal, diverse, inclusive, and constantly evolving society. The prosperity of our lawtech firm should, in our view, translate to the prosperity and improvement of the social environment in which we operate. We are extremely mindful of the social impact we bring about to the wider stakeholders affected by our operation. We aim to conduct our business in a responsible and socially sensitive manner and truly make a difference to the lives of others, and to the society at large.
Charities – Pro bono
Committed to giving back to society, our firm and members participate in various social causes. Our voluntary and social work manifests in many ways. We organize charity events and raise charity money for important causes. Our firm’s founder is the Vice-President of Cy DiaBeaters, a non-profit organisation supporting children suffering from Type 1 Diabetes. In that capacity, our founder participates in the planning and management of various events seeking to bring awareness to, and raise funds for, the advancement of the organisation’s cause.
Our firm highly values pro-bono work, as part of our genuine effort to accommodate as well as possible clients who need our voluntary assistance the most. We provide reduced or free of charge services to clients. Our focus is with clients with limited resources, who wish to implement their ideas, especially with a socially beneficial aspect. Our pro-bono work supports and aids struggling clients with implementing their business ideas and projects; we give to our clients and by extension we offer our assistance to the improvement of the business community. Within this context, we offer pro-bono legal assistance to selective start-up projects, with ground-breaking social and community component and potential.
Diversity, Equality, Fairness, Inclusion
We are strong advocates for diversity and inclusion. We are committed to fostering an open, equal, and safe environment for everyone regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, or any other characteristic. We acknowledge that there is still a long way to go to even out significant inequalities encountered at workplaces across the globe and Cyprus.
For this reason, at Christiana Aristidou LLC, we are active in hosting an open, balanced, and inclusive workspace. We believe that the values of diversity and inclusion are better served by ensuring actual visibility and by giving actual opportunities. Not only are we advocates for gender equality and inclusion, but we take actual actions that ensure, promote, and safeguard such gender inclusion and equality. We support women participation in key business positions, as evidenced by our team’s composition. Our firm also accommodates and gives equal opportunities to people with disability.
Growth, Sustainability, and Environment
We aim to grow our business in a sustainable way that takes account and respects our environment. Businesses operating today must be inevitably guided by the urgency of tackling climate change, and by the need to achieve economic growth on environmentally-friendly, long-term and sustainable bases that benefit the individual, the business, and the community in a balanced way. The Sustainable Plan issued by the UN describes 17 sustainability targets, which guide and inspire our legal practice, values, culture, and presence in the legal and business industry.
We implement and perform recycling policies. We use technology to digitize most of our services in an attempt to minimize our environmental impact; our objective is to go totally paperless, to the extent permitted by applicable and existing laws, regulations and processes. We carefully deploy our firm’s digital transformation and journey, having placed sustainability, long-term growth, and responsibility as main driving forces in our digital strategy. To us, success means that we build an organization that will be able to operate and serve its employees, clients, the business community, society, and the environment in the long run. We are interested in creating an entity that always looks forward and anticipates the challenges of tomorrow. Our firm’s philosophy is targeted at achieving sustainability, and shifting towards an environmentally friendly business model.
Professional and Personal growth
Professional and personal development of our team members are a key concern for our firm. We devote resources towards the professional growth of our lawyers, encouraging them to participate to, and lead, seminars, events, courses and trainings, recognizing the dynamic environment in which we operate. The skills obtained through professional development are valuable to our firm in much the same way as they benefit our lawyers, individually. In our view, individual growth is as significant as professional growth, and businesses should be as mindful of both. For this reason, we operate on flexible and friendly working arrangements as a means to accommodate our members’ personal needs.
Commitment to Digital Strategies and Technology
Our genuine interest in driving society forward, especially by leveraging the potential afforded by disruptive/emerging technologies and innovation is manifested by all our team members’ participation to and our firm’s close relationship with the Cyprus Blockchain Association, a non-profit organization seeking to educate and develop blockchain use in Cyprus. The Cyprus Blockchain Association is in the process of merging with the B.C.T. Blockchain Technologies Ltd to collectively increase their impact and presence in the domestic and international blockchain ecosystem.
In our legal practice, we uphold and abide by the digital and technology strategies issued by official authorities. We closely monitor and offer our insight on the latest developments in the strategic direction of the government, governmental and public authorities, regulators, policy-makers regarding digital and technology evolution and progress, implementing the best practices and guidance introduced with a view to materializing the overarching objective of significant digital development in Cyprus. Our commitment to upholding and forwarding the objectives of digital strategies entailing innovative and forward-thinking solutions is always conditioned on deploying technology and digital means in a socially responsible way that benefits the community and society’s progress in a sustainable way.
Effective Business Practice
Our firm’s objective is to establish an entirely different and new model of a law firm – indeed, our lawtech model pioneers in the legal industry. As explained, we target the sustainable, responsible growth of our firm, based on a strong set of values and a culture of fairness, openness, equality, inclusion and justice, prioritizing our clients and facilitating the growth of our team members. To achieve these goals, we implement effective and efficient management principles, inspired by our founder’s expertise in legal project management. We use agile and lean methodologies to manage, organize, expand and grow our businesses. Doing so enables us to minimize our costs, which in turn reflects the competitive prices given to our clients.
We also link efficiency with our strategic objective of digital transformation. Our digital orientation seeks to facilitate and further develop the performance of the principles of management we already have in place.
Justice and anti-Corruption
As legal professionals, we serve and form part of the justice system. We take this role very seriously. We advocate for facilitating access to justice; effective, timely and easy access to justice is a constitutive tenet of our democracy. At the same time, we support the modernization of the administration of justice in Cyprus, as a reinforcing objective for an easily accessed and fair justice system. To improve our justice system, we take part in relevant initiatives, especially by advocating for the use of technology.
We welcome the developing e-justice scheme and strategy of the Cyprus government, since we believe it will facilitate the objective for modernization and progress of the domestic justice system. As supporters of digital strategies that offer innovative, groundbreaking, and technology-reliant solutions to existing problems, we are supportive of this initiative.
Constitutive of a well-functioning and fair democracy is transparency and the lack of corruption. Unfortunate series of events demonstrating a significant degree of corruption among prominent members of the society disappoint yet do not discourage our attempt to achieve transparency and combat corruption as much as we can from our position. We have introduced and implement stringent AML policies following all applicable rules, regulations, guidance, and using best international practices in this regard. We advocate the use of blockchain as a useful too towards achieving transparency, fairness and tackling corruption, and illegal activities.
Human Rights and Modern Slavery
Governments and businesses must uphold and respect human rights and prevent and combat modern slavery and human trafficking. The UN as well as governments around the world impose obligations on companies to ensure that their actions respect human rights, and that they take initiatives and actions against modern slavery and human trafficking. The standard to which businesses and governments are called to adhere is high, not least due to the urgency and severity of these areas.
As a law firm that truly believes in the use and exercise of corporate power and actions in a responsible way, and takes initiatives to tackle inequality, lack of fair opportunities, discrimination and injustice, Christiana Aristidou LLC commits to upholding human rights and abiding by the stricter measures in combatting and preventing modern slavery and human trafficking practices. Our practice and initiatives at Christiana Aristidou LLC are always consistent with the need to contribute to these areas in a meaningful and effective way.