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I agree that showing how it would impact either the firm or its clients in some way would make your answer much more comprehensive and relevant. However, when thinking about this, you can think outside the box - if you talk about societal problems, you can link it to some of the firm's pro bono projects or corporate social responsibility aspects, for example. Firms as big as A&O have probably done some project in almost every area that you can think of. Also with clients - they have such a great variety of clients that it may be not that difficult to put that in.

But to add to this, I think it is important to see the question in the context of the application as a whole. I am not familiar with this year's A&O's application, but if you feel like you have space to show your interest in the firm and the commercial world enough in the rest of the application, then I think there is no harm in looking outside of commercial law (it is even beneficial), after all the question will lead you to talking about "law" anyway, so there is no chance it could be completely law-unrelated!

I think when answering this I am thinking about HSF's 'introduce a topic question' - speaking to GR they liked that people's passions and interests got channeled through and there was not one way to answer the question.