Improving its ‘green’ credentials might be seen as a strange issue for the management of an international law firm to consider, even if it is becoming a very hot media topic. It is, however, what my firm has done, when we achieved carbon-neutral status across all 20 of our offices worldwide last month.
The reactions to our news have been universally positive, which is pleasing and, I must confess, a slight relief. Lawyers, especially in the City, tend to be a cynical bunch and I was half expecting comments about jumping on a bandwagon (although, among law firms at least, there is not yet much of a bandwagon to jump on).
A common reaction has been a desire to understand why we have made this decision and what benefits we hope to achieve. After all, the financial outlay is significant and the steps that we are taking as a business to reduce our carbon footprint further will require a lot of effort.
I am the first to admit that the decision to achieve carbon-neutral status was not driven by senior management. Instead, it is a good example of a decision driven by the (increasingly green) grass roots of our business.
Several years ago, we formed an environ-mental forum, whose members are drawn from all parts of the firm — business support teams, trainees, associates and partners. Their job has been to devise and implement our environmental policy and, at the same time, reach into the firm to make sure that as a business we stay in touch with the views of our people in this area.
The environmental forum became a keen advocate for becoming carbon neutral about six months ago and did the ground work that led to a recommendation to our senior management a short while ago.
When I first became aware that this issue was surfacing, I started to talk to people about it and two things struck me. First, how passionately some of our people feel about this subject: many of our employees already privately offset their carbon emissions. Second, how much people cared about what we did as a business. This level of interest has made the decision to go carbon neutral much easier because a key element of that decision has been to ensure that we continue to reduce our carbon footprint. This involves individuals doing things differently; and if individuals care about the reason for a change, they will be far more likely to respond.
Overall, we expect to derive a number of benefits from going carbon neutral. We will align ourselves more closely with many of our clients; and we will also become more efficient as a business. But above all, we are responding to something that many of our employees want to do. This will give them a sense of engagement in our business and, at the same time, make them proud of the organ-isation that they belong to.
Looking forward, a key component of our decision to become carbon neutral is to ensure that we have a meaningful say in the way in which the money raised by our carbon credit payments is spent.
We are working closely with the Carbon-Neutral Company to ensure that our investment is directed towards developing new and sustainable energy resources, rather than just reforestation which, while worthwhile, does not tackle the wider issue of dwindling energy supplies.
So far, therefore, it has been a very interesting experience from which we have learned a lot about ourselves as a business. While, in the past, ‘green’ issues have not been high on our management agenda, they are now and they are here to stay.
Mark Dawkins is managing partner of Simmons & Simmons.
