Environmental responsibility
As a firm we are committed to operating our business, and providing services to our clients, in an environmentally responsible way.
The climate crisis is not a new phenomenon but is rightly becoming an ever greater focus for everybody around the world. The only way to effect change is for environmental awareness to permeate all that we do. As a law firm, we recognise that we are no different from any other business in this regard.
We are a single office firm servicing clients almost exclusively within the UK. We don’t fly around the world on a regular basis. Most of our business travel is via public transport. This means that we cannot make headline grabbing commitments to reduce our carbon footprint by limiting travel; although we can and do encourage staff to travel by train rather than plane.
But the environmental impact of a business is about more than this. We are committed to limiting our consumption of non-renewable and non-sustainable products and food whenever we can.
We are long-standing members of the Legal Sustainability Alliance and value the insight this provides into ways of constantly improving our environmental credentials. We also have a dedicated sustainability partner who is responsible for overseeing our efforts and identifying potential improvements on an ongoing basis. This is supported by the firm’s ‘Green Team’, made up of representatives from throughout the business and whose aim is to foster a positive green culture within the firm and monitor our internal environmental policy to ensure it evolves and develops. Examples of initiatives we have run include:
- early adoption of follow-me printing
- pro bono environmental projects to plant trees and rewild urban areas
- providing all staff with reuseable keep cups to limit consumption of single use cups
- adoption of a high level waste collection system and training staff in the use of this.
We value practical and achievable steps that everybody within the firm can buy into and which we can monitor and measure. The best way of protecting the environment is to engage everybody and foster an environmentally responsible culture in the way we conduct ourselves and this is our aim.
