Printers: Unused and unloved at Dentons
A City law firm has asked its lawyers to e-sign an agreement not to print documents for a low-carbon service specially developed for the Government Legal Department (GLD).
Caroline Connolly, environmental sustainability manager at Dentons, said that during the four-month project there were no in-person meetings, apart from an initial meeting, and dashboards were used to reduce emails.
Up to 40 lawyers at Dentons worked with Defra Legal Advisers, part of the GLD, on a range of work spanning five Defra teams, as part of the project.
The law firm hopes the approach taken can serve “as a blueprint” for other client work, allowing it to decarbonise its services “across the board”.
Ms Connolly said lawyers worked on a hybrid basis to reduce commuting, with two-fifths of their time spent working from home.
There were “zero in-person meetings”, apart from an initial “kick-off meeting” at the law firm’s offices in the City, and no printing because lawyers had “signed and agreed” online that they would not print anything.
As a result, there was no need for postage or couriers to move documents around.
Ms Connolly said Dentons, which is committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2040, proposed the concept to Defra as part of its “net zero journey”.
In collaboration with Defra, Dentons established an “emissions baseline”, before identifying the changes that had to be implemented to decarbonise the service and the data needed to calculate reductions.
Suresh Arasaratnam, senior legal project manager at Dentons, said the firm’s instruction support tool Legal Front Door was used to create dashboards and reduce the use of email.
Through the dashboard, Defra could get to the right specialist immediately, with “everything posted in one place”, rather than multiple emails being sent round.
Mr Arasaratnam said Legal Front Door, developed from Thomson Reuters HighQ software, had been used by Dentons to create portals for a “whole host of clients”.
In the case of Defra, it allowed them, at their request, to see their “overall legal spend at any given time”.
Dentons has calculated that use of Legal Front Door “offered 78% lower carbon intensity” than using emails.
The law firm has estimated that its low carbon service as a whole cut the carbon footprint by 44%, reducing emissions by around 120kg CO2e [carbon dioxide equivalent] or 14,597 smartphone charges.
Ms Connolly commented: “We believe we are among the first major law firms to offer a genuinely low carbon service and are proud to demonstrate that law firms can make a meaningful positive impact on the climate, in balance with their commercial aims.”
Ms Connolly said legal services represented a “small but significant” source of scope 3 carbon emissions – emissions which do not relate to a firm’s real estate, such as goods and services, waste and business travel.
She added that ensuring the initiative had “lasting impact” would require the law firm to “further integrate and strengthen our proven net zero commitment into our everyday working practices and evolve our operations in partnership with our clients – something we are consciously working to do”.
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