Strategic partnerships between companies and social impact organizations are increasingly moving toward integrated, long-term models. This is the case with Hogan Lovells and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), A 360° partnership brings together corporate volunteering and pro bono support, combining employee engagement with professional expertise to address real-world challenges and deliver measurable impact.

The collaboration between Hogan Lovells and HOT began in 2017 and has progressively expanded. The past two years have represented the most active phase of the collaboration, both in scale and measurable outcomes.

Corporate Volunteering & Employee Engagement

Virtual mapathons offer a scalable and accessible format, enabling employees, regardless of their technical background, to contribute to the creation and validation of geospatial data. During each activity, participants receive guided support and clear explanations of the tools, ensuring a simple and user-friendly process.

Through these initiatives, volunteers have supported the identification of priority areas following natural disasters, such as Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica and the earthquake in Myanmar, as well as contributing to mapping efforts in the Amazon region aimed at strengthening environmental resilience in rural and Indigenous communities or supported to improve the efficiency of drone flight planning in Sierra Leone.

In all cases, facilitating the production of high-quality maps that supports evidence-based decision-making related to disaster response, land-use planning, environmental protection, and the identification of vulnerable areas.

Since last year, over 500 employees across the globe from various Hogan Lovells’ offices checked more than 490,000 km2 and 1,300,000 tiles.

From a governance and impact perspective, the outcomes are concrete and traceable.

The key value of these mapathons lies in their inclusivity and their ability to translate employee participation into actionable data,” explains Hogan Lovells Community Investment and Fundraising Senior Coordinator Kiana Lee. “By providing structured guidance and easy-to-use tools, employees with no prior mapping experience can meaningfully contribute to projects that deliver real value to local authorities, humanitarian actors, and environmental organizations.

Taking part in the mapathons has been a great way to support communities affected by disasters and environmental challenges, without needing any specialized skills, says one employee volunteer. The process is simple and flexible, I can contribute from my desk or even on the go through microvolunteering on my phone or the web. It’s accessible for remote workers or anyone with limited mobility. It is a straightforward process. Despite being virtual, the impact is tangible and measurable,reinforcing both our sense of purpose and our active role in advancing our firm’s Responsible Business objectives.

Pro bono legal advice

At HOT, we develop open source products, such as the HOT tech suite, in order to address ecosystem gaps in the use of geospatial technology in development and humanitarian projects, aiming for a world where everyone has access to the right technology to use open map data for social change.

A critical step in enabling that mapping workflow and the full end to end mapping experience is access to open imagery, without imagery, there is no map! Imagery can also be costly or simply not available. In order to address this gap HOT focused on development of the DroneTasking Manager, allowing anyone with an access to a drone, including low-cost consumer or DIY models, to contribute aerial imagery to a global, free, and open repository.

While developing the software, testing and implementing the work has its own technical challenges, the real and biggest challenge, often not so spoken about, is the legal challenge of understanding, complying with, and ultimately influencing in a positive fashion, drone regulations in the countries HOT operates- and this is where Hogan Lovell’s pro bono team came in.

In July 2024, HOT began collaborating with Hogan Lovells’ pro bono team following a public webinar on drone tasking manager. At HOT, we were excited to see how approachable and easy to speak to the Hogan Lovells Pro Bono team, people who are truly committed to their work and really care about HOT’s work, and most importantly did not speak in legal jargon. They listened to us and looked at the requirements of what is needed and what will really make an impact in the work HOT is doing. We started by identifying a list of countries where HOT had upcoming projects - the HL team provided an overview of drone regulation for Sierra Leone, Zambia and Kenya and are currently working on Brazil, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Mexico, and Nigeria.

The team has also been extremely helpful with creating connections with local counsel in countries like Kenya through their Hogan Lovells Connect Network.

For example, in Sierra Leone, HOT undertook to cover the entire city of Freetown with high-resolution imagery using small community-operated drones for use by local communities and the Freetown City Council. As the Sierra Leonean national drone regulations were quite new, and almost all previous drone work in the country had been by professional operators with large expensive drones, no one, including the Civil Aviation Agency (CAA), had yet developed the experience to manage drone mapping by local people using small, cheap quadcopters. The comprehensive research and briefing provided by the Hogan Lovells team allowed HOT and our community partners to approach the CAA with confidence and professionalism. In the end, the Sierra Leonean CAA became a friend and ally to HOT, and an advocate for community drone mapping. The professionalism of the Hogan Lovells dossier was a key factor in achieving this outcome.

As HOT, and associated open mapping and development communities, continue to pursue vastly greater coverage of community-led drone mapping, we hope to go beyond compliance with existing legislation and advocate globally for community-friendly drone regulations. Everyone wins when drone legislation promotes safe, secure, well-regulated drone use, but also encourages local entrepreneurs (rather than restricting drone use to well-funded agencies, companies, and foreign-led consultancies). Hogan Lovells’ expertise and connections globally are a key asset in this ambition.

As the HL team of lawyers based in the US and CE who have been supporting HOT as they expand their drone mapping operations across Africa and South America, it has been particularly interesting for us to collaborate with HOT’s team who are so passionate about what they do and as the landscape for drones is still developing in many of these jurisdictions.

HL team: Matthew Clark, Hanson Causbie, Camilla Fröhlich and Tom Walsh

HOT has also had the opportunity to share more widely about our work in Pioneers Post thanks to an introduction from Hogan Lovells. You can read more in here.

In Mexico, HOT has been further supported by a Hogan Lovells team around Lila Gasca, Director of Pro Bono Mexico, on the establishment of a legal entity in Mexico in order to operate locally and to be in a position to access donations and other funding opportunities available in Mexico. Since 2024, the Latin America and the Caribbean Hub has supported corporate volunteering sessions focused on the use of tools such as MapSwipe, sharing insights about the Missing Maps initiative, and deepening understanding of citizen science and open mapping as powerful tools through which volunteers can get to know their territory and contribute to reducing the mapping gap in the region.

What next?

We continue our collaboration with Hogan Lovells into the new year and employees across offices ranging from Benelux to Louisville, have organised local events and mapping sessions in the coming months. A true collaboration is one with shared understanding, commitment to the cause and based on trust - we are grateful for our long standing collaboration with Hogan Lovells.

You can reach us if you want to learn more detail about any of these engagements. We hope that this collaboration inspires other organizations to join corporate volunteering campaigns or consider areas of pro bono work or corporate volunteering in which they can support non-governmental organisations like HOT.