Barlow Robbins LLP
One of Surrey's leading law firms with offices in Guildford, Woking and Godalming
There were numerous reasons. Our partners felt a strong moral imperative to take action. There was concern amongst some of our staff who had taken steps to reduce their carbon footprint at home and felt uncomfortable that they were not able to do the same at work. We also recognised that taking an environmental stance would enhance our repution amongst potential recruits to the practice - particularly young lawyers- and invitations to tender for work were increasingly asking about our environmental credentials.
In March 2007 we formed a "Green Team" to look at the ways in which the firm could operate in a more environmentally responsible way, and then to put those ideas into practice. The Green Team has the full support of the partners.
The Green Team is made up of partners and employees all of whom share a commitment to helping the firm and its employees to be as environmentally friendly as possible. The Green Team send out emails regularly, raising awareness of any new initiatives that are put in place, passing on helpful tips and seeking input and suggestions as to how we could do even better. We have found that the Green Team’s suggestions are received positively and help ensure that all employees feel part of the firm-wide effort to improve our environmental credentials.
We have an Environmentally Friendly Good Practice Checklist, which employees access via the firm's intranet. The checklist focuses in particular on paper use, electricity use, travel and personal knowledge/awareness, which are some of the main areas where we have a direct positive impact.
Our environmental initiatives include:
Recycling: paper, plastic, aluminium tins and drink cans, cardboard, toner cartridges and carrier bags. Stationery is ordered from recycled or sustainable sources and scrap paper is now reused wherever possible before being recycled.
Energy Saving: introduction of motion sensitive lights, encouraging efficient use of paper and photocopying, the reduction of printers from 130 to 50, replacement of individual PC's with "Thin Clients" which use about 50% less power, replacement of CRT monitors with TFT equivalents which use 70% less power and implementation of virtualisation in all new Server roll outs to reduce power consumption.
Travel
Partners in the practice spend a lot of time commuting between offices and clients as part of the conduct of our business. Great efforts are made to share vehicles, and journeys are now much more frequently by train whenever feasible.
Personal awareness & responsibility
We share environmentally friendly knowledge with our staff through updates and group training. For instance, we are screening the Al Gore film "An Inconvenient Truth", which all employees are invited to attend.
Many of our staff are really keen to help the environment and their morale has been boosted by our positive stance. Some of those who weren’t ‘green’ before have been convinced by seeing “An Inconvenient Truth”. The project so far has been cost neutral and hasd even produced savings. We thoroughly recommend that other businesses adopt a green policy.
We have not yet put in place measures for everything. However, a recent competition between different office locations in the firm showed a clear reduction in the usage and therefore cost of paper.