Risk and cost reduction - the by-products of going green

In recent years, with the global financial crisis and recession biting, there was a question mark as to whether businesses would give up any focus on Green initiatives and focus on the hard-nosed business of income and costs instead. However, while many organisations will have been consciously watching costs and spending less than when times were better, the anticipated flight from environmental concerns does not seem to have materialised. Why? Well, it’s not rocket science - in recent years two trends have increased in importance but are, happily, by-products of a focus on environmental management:- cost reduction and information security.

Switching your entire business to run from solar panels and wind turbines would doubtless be very expensive, but encouraging staff to reduce the firm’s carbon emissions through reducing energy consumption and to use paper sparingly can easily help to reduce costs. You use less, you pay less, you emit less carbon, it costs less. Additionally, technology that helps to reduce energy consumption is available and although it may not be cheap, a convincing argument can be made that a modest upfront investment can pay dividends over the medium- to long-term. A good example of this would be server virtualisation, where converting 8 physical servers that are each using 5% of their resources onto a single virtual host results in reduced power consumption, rack space, cooling, hardware maintenance etc. The older and more power hungry the server you virtualise the more environmental benefit you get. Printing on both sides? It doesn’t take a mathematician to work out that you use up to half the physical sheets of paper that way. Just encouraging staff to switch off devices when not in use can have an impact. Ditto suppliers - just as clients want us to be greener, we can put pressure on our suppliers to demonstrate their green credentials. So a focus on cost-cutting has arguably in many ways helped the Greening of IT in law firms.

Information security is another area that is rising in profile and prominence, with clients understandably wanting to see that their suppliers are following best practice, including their lawyers. Law firms are traditionally seen as being highly risk-averse but also as slow to change, two traits that tend to be misaligned in the area of information security. Being slow to change from a paper-based way of working to an electronic one means carrying over the risks inherent in paper - namely that it burns, turns to sludge when wet and is very easy to lose. Enter the Electronic File. So if you’re having trouble convincing people that saving trees by reducing paper is a good idea, try this - paper is a lot less secure than electronic records and clients know this. Approaching e-Filing from a Risk standpoint rather than a tree-hugging one just makes sense. Your IT team can encrypt smartphones, laptops, USB sticks, email and pretty much anything else that’s stored in bits and bytes, so losing any of these things is not going to cause a major problem. Leave a briefcase or folder full of paper on a train or lying about where it can be seen, however, and it’s a different story.

With the focus on costs and risk high on the agenda, promoting green behaviour in a law firm shouldn’t be an uphill struggle. Green behaviours and technologies can make a lot of sense financially and provide better protection for the business, as well as having CSR and other benefits.

Damien Behan is IT director at Brodies LLP.