This blog is the third part of a four-part series titled “From Business of Human Rights to Business for Human Rights”.

In Blog I and Blog II of this series we discussed the theoretical foundations and practical manifestations of ethical dilemmas faced by lawyers, particularly in the context of the growing body of hard law obligations in the emerging field of Business and Human Rights (BHR).  In this blog, we shift our focus to the whole industry of professional services that has emerged around BHR. It is no longer just activists and academics pushing the agenda – there are now law firms, BHR consultancies, accountancy firms, legal-tech firms, and companies who are actively shaping the policy landscape. Many of these firms and consultancies are often staffed by people from communications, management, sustainability, or other backgrounds such as international development or business ethics, all of whom now make their living in this space.

As many of these actors not only respond to regulation but also influence its design through lobbying and advocacy, there is a need to ask some important questions about the “business of human rights” and how incentives should align with the ethical responsibility of these professionals?

This blog maps out different players in this industry and asks what trade-offs, responsibilities, and power dynamics are at stake with the objective of asking a broader question – Is there a need for developing standards or norms to ground and guide this growing industry of ‘BHR Professionals’ in ethical principles?

BHR Practice within Law Firms

As discussed in Blog II, big law firms offering a ‘full service’ experience to their corporate clients may treat questions about adverse human rights and environmental impacts of their corporate clients as side issues. When the same firm handles both a merger and a related human rights matter, there could be a conflict of interest. While firms often navigate similar competing considerations across employment, environmental, or antitrust matters, getting the BHR calculus wrong can result in serious human rights harm, which is intrinsically problematic and undermines the firm’s own commitment to the UN Guiding Principles.

With the rise of BHR regulations, law firms are carving out dedicated BHR, ESG or Supply-Chain practices. While some of the lawyers comprising these teams have built careers at least in part around BHR or come from civil society organisations (CSOs), many are corporate generalists or compliance lawyers who have simply pivoted into this space. This creates a tension in how BHR regulations are interpreted as the lawyer’s training and instincts are often rooted in advancing corporate client interests.

In contrast to the multi-practice large law firms, there are also smaller, boutique law firms that have focused BHR practices (ex. Omnia Strategy LLP, Paxus LLP, blue marble legal), often founded or staffed by lawyers who previously worked at larger firms. While many of the ethical questions that arise for smaller boutique firms are similar to the ones facing large law firms, positioning their commitment to human rights as central to their market differentiation can create a different set of tensions. Firms which promote themselves explicitly as human rights specialists might exercise caution in choosing corporate clients whose activities may undermine or compromise their reputational integrity. Although mandates are often confidential, a firm’s integrity could be undermined if it were revealed that it had not adhered to its stated principles. Avoiding such misuse requires law firms to maintain vigilance over how their work is presented.

The trade-offs between large and small law firms are worth reflecting on. Boutique firms may have a clearer mission or passion for certain clients or causes and may scrutinise human rights risks more closely. Large firms, on the other hand, work with major corporate clients and across multiple practice areas, meaning that if information about “red flags” discovered during regular corporate or transactional work were effectively shared across teams, they would be well positioned to make impact at scale – that is, across large client portfolios and high-value transactions. However, this potential is far from guaranteed. Precisely because large firms are diversified and deeply embedded in corporate deal-making, conflicting commercial interests, client pressures, and internal silos can easily inhibit coordinated action on human rights and environmental risks. In some cases, companies may even prefer large firms because they are less likely to challenge them meaningfully, raising the risk of greenwashing rather than genuine progress.  Understanding what environment best supports committed BHR lawyers in doing meaningful work can shed light on potential barriers in general legal practice and point to ways in which these might be overcome.

BHR Consultancies

Like boutique law firms, there are also specialized consulting firms that focus on BHR. The difference primarily being that unlike law firms, consultancies do not necessarily comprise only lawyers. Their services tend to focus more on advisory, ESG-related strategy setting for companies (ex. Kumi Consulting, SFA Oxford) or development and implementation of HREDD (e.g. assessments, worker engagement, and community engagement) for specific projects (ex. Beyond Human Rights Compliance, CORE, BSR). While boutique BHR consultancies often highlight their interdisciplinary expertise, drawing on practitioners with backgrounds in development studies, social science, field research, community engagement, or organisational change, this may not automatically translate into deeper or more transformative human rights practice than what BHR law firms offer. Without firm commitment to values, they may also contribute to “tick box” compliance cultures.

This raises a parallel question to that posed for law firms – to what extent are these consultancies able, and willing, to push corporate clients beyond procedural compliance to embed substantive, rights-based change in difficult human rights contexts? Would their advice and assessment be integrated into broader business strategy and governance processes in the same way that broader accountants and consulting firms have access to?

Accounting Firms

Accounting represents another increasingly visible player in the BHR professional services ecosystem. Most of these firms have aligned their offerings with emerging regulatory frameworks that generate large-scale advisory and assurance work, a key focus being the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) in Europe. Unlike law firms that focus on interpreting legal liability, risk exposure, and remediation, these firms’ role lies primarily in translating regulatory obligations into reportable metrics and auditable processes. Their role has grown with the proliferation of disclosure and reporting for non-financial metrics such as human rights risks, for some of which mandatory third-party assurance is required.

This raises questions about the depth of their engagement with human rights principles and whether and to what extent these firms are genuinely embedding BHR considerations into corporate practice, or if they are simply “tick-boxing” compliance to serve regulatory needs. As these firms increasingly expand their presence in non-financial reporting and auditing services, a question to ask is to what extent are they incentivised to adapt their approaches to reporting obligations to support and improve substantive BHR outcomes. There is a risk that a more “traditional” approach to accounting would narrow the BHR agenda to what is easily measurable and reportable unless their advice actively incorporates expertise in substantive activities beyond mere reporting compliance (where it may be better to also liaise with BHR consultants or experts). Given that these firms often have the opportunity to shape standards of BHR reporting and implementation through discussions with the Board of Directors and  C-suite of large corporations alongside their proprietary methodologies, templates, and benchmarks, it is important that they recognise the influence they wield and take responsibility for ensuring that their guidance supports, not undermines, substantive human rights practices.

Supply Chain Tech Consultants

Technology is fast becoming a central tool at the frontier of BHR, and supply chain tech firms are now increasingly incorporating human rights risks into their services. The use and adoption of technological tools present the paradox of compliance. On one hand, these tools can facilitate and support efforts towards meaningful due diligence. For instance, in the United States, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) uses platforms like Sayari to trace supply chains and flag goods potentially linked to forced labour, which can result in Withhold Release Orders (WROs). To lift these, companies must demonstrate – often through tech-enabled traceability – that their products are free from forced labour at every stage. On the other hand, such tools have also been used for superficial regulatory compliance with the German Supply Chain Act rather than to actually address underlying human rights harms.

Ultimately, technology must not be used merely as a tool for compliance. It must enable more substantive engagement with human rights risks and remediation. In this context, the role, incentives and accountability of tech firms must be questioned. Are they designing tools for genuine human rights accountability or for plausible denial of responsibility by their corporate clients? When corporations rely on opaque risk algorithms, who bears responsibility for the human rights blind spots those systems create? And finally, how do we ensure scrutiny and accountability of tech-firms themselves when their tools increasingly shape how corporations “see” and respond to human rights risks?

In-house Professionals

The emergence of dedicated Human Rights, CSR, or ESG officers, managers and in-house counsel in large corporations represents a relatively recent development. It also signals a change in the way corporations wish to represent themselves. These roles can be found in different departments within the company (e.g. sustainability, compliance, legal) which can influence how BHR considerations are integrated into business strategy and decisions and how much influence and resources these teams or professionals have.

In practice, a major challenge is that these professionals often lack real influence within their organizations. They may face limitations due to insufficient resources, lack of seniority, or inadequate support from senior management, weakening their ability to drive meaningful change. At the same time, they are increasingly playing a growing role – intentionally or inadvertently – in shaping BHR policy by engaging in industry-level discussions, advocacy or lobbying activities. Their dual role – advising internal teams such as corporate strategy, legal or procurement, while simultaneously representing the company in external policy discussions – can put them in a structural conflict of interest where the company’s commercial priorities may clash with their own professional judgement on what responsible BHR policy should look like.

While it is crucial to have such professionals within companies, it is important to ensure they are able to serve as critical voices who “think against” the board, offering perspectives that may challenge established corporate priorities. To ensure this, companies should establish safeguards that guarantee adequate independence, resources, and influence. This could include structural models where BHR or ESG divisions report directly to the board, or are functionally independent of it, thereby enabling professionals to act with integrity and objectivity. In this context, the larger question that arises is – do we need structural and institutional measures to facilitate in-house human rights and sustainability professionals with greater independence and authority to remain true to the ethical objectives of their role?

The growing professionalisation of the “Business of Human Rights” shows both how far the BHR agenda has come and how complicated it has become. Lawyers, consultants, auditors, and tech providers and in-house professionals now make a living advising companies on human rights. But as this “industry” expands, it also inherits the same conflicts of interest and commercial pressures that shape the corporate world it seeks to reform.

BHR professionals hold considerable influence on how BHR standards are translated into practice. This prompts the question – what does it mean to be a BHR professional? Beyond technical skill, the field may need its own ethical foundations defining the standards of independence, integrity and accountability. This might mean developing professional guidelines or corporate commitments to ensure protection against adverse consequences for taking up bolder positions that advance human rights (an idea that we will explore further in the final blog of the series). Such safeguards should apply both within the company and in corporate client advice, even when it challenges the company’s interests. At the end of the day, what matters is not how many BHR consultancies emerge or self-described BHR ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’ flood the field, but whether this ‘industry’ grows roots in principles or in profits. If the goal is to move from the business of human rights to business for human rights, then the profession needs its own moral compass. Perhaps this blog offers a starting point for that conversation – what ethical guidelines and professional standards should ‘BHR professionals’ embody?

We would like to thank Claire Heiden and Madeleine Wonneberger from Harvard Law School for their valuable help in industry research. We would also like to acknowledge and thank Aladdin Benali (Omnia Strategy), Boudewijn de Bruin (University of Groningen), James Ford (Mayer Brown), Lisa Szeponik and Serra Cremer (CORE), Peter Nestor (Novartis) and Anaïs Tobalagba (Beyond Human Rights Compliance) for their thoughtful feedback in shaping this blog.