Welcome to part fourteen of our blog series on Going Green, dedicated to helping attorneys practice law in a more environmentally friendly way.  Last week we discussed your ability to represent “green” clients.  This week we will focus on law firms who encourage their employees to work from home more often.

“Lawyers at the Newark firm Sills Cummis get a $3,000 allowance to buy laptops so they can work from home rather than idle in traffic.”  That is a line in this story from NJ.com, written in August of last year, and the #1 ranked page for the search term “law firms going green”.

That symbolizes that in order for law firms to truly initiate any kind of green policies, they have to incentivize their employees to get on board.  We discussed this previously in part ten of this blog series, but it is worth noting that unless your employees buy into a more environmentally friendly law firm, it just won’t happen.

Encouraging employees to work from home is a great way to get them to buy into the system.  People like to work from home, and if it is allowed, you will see many people take advantage of it.  Your job is to tell them why they should be working from home, and make it as easy as possible for them to do so without falling behind.

An allowance to buy a new laptop is one great way to make working remotely more convenient.  In addition, you could have an IT professional set up a program on everyone’s computer so that the lawyers can log in from outside the office.  That same IT person could also demonstrate to everyone at the firm how to use it properly.

Another helpful thing would include a database of information that people could access from outside the office.  If there are a lot of people working on one case, it makes sense that anyone working from home has access to all the same files that people in the office have access to.  This means a secure website and a sophisticated scanning system that allows files to be shared among a limitless number of people.

Sometimes, working from home is simply not an option.  Next week we will dive into further incentives that can help limit travel, or encourage smarter travel.

Past Installments in this Series
Part One – An Introduction to Going Green
Part Two – Cut Electricity Costs, Just Flip the Switch
Part Three – Forget Paper, Go Digital
Part Four – Travel Together, Travel Less
Part Five – We Recycle
Part Six – Natural Lighting
Part Seven – Know Your Gadgets
Part Eight – Setting Goals
Part Nine – Reusable Bottles and Mugs
Part Ten - Setting Employee Incentives
Part Eleven - Green Products for You
Part Twelve – Greening Your Mail
Part Thirteen – Representing Green Clients