GOING GREEN

Dear NONE,

Did you know that each attorney in the U.S. consumes the paper equivalent of one ton of wood per year, which makes the legal profession the single biggest user of paper?

According to figures developed by the ABA and EPA, the life cycle of one ton of office paper is so energy-intensive that it releases nine tons of global-warming causing carbon dioxide gases (not to mention killing millions of trees).

These startling figures are some of what's behind the green initiatives that are taking hold in the legal profession.  Law firms around the country are taking a hard look at their firms' environmental impact and committing themselves to addressing and minimizing that impact, including a reduction of that resource most obviously associated with our profession--paper.  According to the article, "Green Law Firms Are Where It's At", the effort isn't completely altruistic.  Reducing paper usage, saving energy and recycling can lead to significant savings.

Here, at Marsh, Rickard & Bryan, we've begun to talk about how we can bring our environmental concerns to the office.  As individuals, we've started with the simple things each of us can do on our own like turning off the lights to our office and turning off our computers at the end of the day.  Mike Beard introduced us to paper recycling.  He started with a few bins that he personally carried back and forth to the recycling center; now we have bins scattered throughout the office and a recycling company that regularly picks up white paper. (Although Mike is still carrying the aluminum cans to the recycling center himself!) Henry Cornelius is pushing us to move to duplex printing (a fancy way of saying print on both sides of a piece of paper!) Susan Silvernail, with her interest in technology, is keeping old computers and used ink and toner cartridges out of the landfills by donating the computers to local non-profit agencies and recycling the cartridges.  She replaced all the firm's cathode ray tube monitors with liquid crystal display units.  LCD monitors consume less power and have a longer life than CRT monitors.  The firm copies fewer depositions and documents by using on-line repositories.  We've converted many inter-office memos to e-mail instead of paper.  We have just taken a major step toward reducing our travel (by plane and car) by equipping a conference room with video-conference capability thereby reducing our carbon footprint. 

If you are putting green initiatives to work at your law firm, we'd be interested in talking to you about them.  We'd like to know what you think works and what doesn't.  Bar associations in other states (e.g., Massachusetts and Oregon) have advanced green guidelines for lawyers in their states to follow.  Sounds like its time for Alabama lawyers to push for green guidelines!

©2008 Marsh, Rickard & Bryan, P.C.

No representation is made that the quality of legal services to be performed is greater

than the quality of legal services performed by other lawyers.