News
Recap: Our climate risk hackathon at London Climate Action Week 2025
As part of this year’s London Climate Action Week (LCAW), The Chancery Lane Project (TCLP) brought together 55 lawyers for our first in-person hackathon in over five years.
A “hackathon” is a concept borrowed from the tech world, referring to a fast-paced, collaborative sprint to develop practical solutions. Ours focused on embedding climate risk into everyday commercial legal practice.
Participants represented a wide range of sectors, including supply chains, mergers and acquisitions, financial services, energy, technology, and construction. Together, we:
- Listed key climate risks in each practice area.
- Mapped possible legal consequences.
- Identified practical tools, clauses and strategies to manage those risks.
“What I love about these events is that they are equal parts conversation as transformation. They turn talking into doing, problems into prototypes, and collective angst into collaborative action. Where other events identify barriers, hackathons begin dismantling them, unleashing the quiet power of legal imagination to accelerate real-world solutions. It’s not just energising, it’s catalytic,” said Matthew Gingell, General Counsel at Oxygen House.
Key takeaways
Participants demonstrated that climate risk isn’t abstract or distant – it’s very much affecting commercial legal practice here and now.
Some of the highlights from discussions were:
- The increasing frequency of acute weather events can lead to asset devaluation, operational disruption and adverse impacts on the cost and availability of insurance.
- With climate risk now foreseeable and quantifiable, force majeure and other risk allocation clauses need a fresh look.
- Robust climate due diligence is non-negotiable for competent risk management.
Attendees also expressed how rare and valuable it is for lawyers across firms to unite to tackle a problem together.
Navraj Singh Ghaleigh, Senior Lecturer in Climate Law at the University of Edinburgh, told us, “The energy, creativity, and commitment in the room was so impressive … I’m excited to see how this work continues to evolve and embed climate risk into the fabric of legal practice.”
TCLP itself began at LCAW in 2019. Our inaugural hackathon later that year used sticky notes and whiteboards to draft decarbonisation clauses. Bringing it back at LCAW felt like closing the circle.
What’s next?
Our hackathon outputs will shape new templates, guidance and community discussions.
To dive deeper, try TCLP’s free CPD-accredited course, Climate Contracting in Action.
And if you would like to join a working group to help continue to build practical solutions to climate risk, email Matilda.