Company: LAZ
Filing Date: 2025-02-24
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001628280-25-007441
Chunk: 133

Company: Lazard, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-24
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 133
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 ESG considerations expose us to potential liabilities, increased costs, reputational harm, and other adverse effects on our business. 

As a financial services firm, we depend to a large extent on our relationships with our clients and our reputation for integrity and high-caliber professional services to attract and retain clients. Companies across all industries are facing increasing scrutiny from customers, clients, regulators, investors, and other stakeholders related to their ESG practices and disclosures.  As a result, there is demand for information related to ESG factors, such as climate change, natural resources, waste reduction, energy, human capital, and risk oversight, including with respect to our supply chain, which expands the scope and complexity of matters that we are expected to assess and report. 

We make statements about our ESG goals and initiatives through our Corporate Sustainability reporting and our Asset Management Sustainable Investing perspectives, which are available on our public websites. We may not achieve our ESG goals and initiatives. In addition, some stakeholders may disagree with our goals and initiatives. Any failure, or perceived failure, to achieve our goals, further our initiatives, adhere to our public statements, comply with federal, state or international regulations, or meet evolving and varied stakeholder expectations and standards could result in legal and regulatory proceedings against us or client dissatisfaction and materially adversely affect our business, reputation, results of operations, financial condition and stock price.

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Employee misconduct, which is difficult to detect and deter, could harm us by impairing our ability to attract and retain clients and subjecting us to significant legal liability and reputational harm.

There have been a number of highly publicized cases involving fraud or other misconduct by employees in the financial services industry generally, and we run the risk that employee misconduct could occur in our business as well. For example, misconduct by employees could involve the improper use or disclosure of confidential information, which could result in legal action, regulatory sanctions and reputational or financial harm. Our Financial Advisory business often requires that we deal with confidences of great significance to our clients or their counterparties, improper use of which may harm our clients or our relationships with our clients. Any breach of confidences as a result of employee misconduct may adversely affect our reputation, impair our ability to attract and retain Financial Advisory clients and subject us to liability. Similarly, in our Asset Management business, we have authority over client assets, and we may, from time to time, have custody of such assets. In addition, we often have discretion to trade client assets on the client’s behalf and must do so acting