Mark Routley

The committee will be responsible for actively reducing, with a view to minimising, the environmental impacts of litigation in all three UK jurisdictions of England & Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as per the Greener Litigation Pledge, which TLT signed last year.

In particular, the committee will:

• Raise awareness of greener disputes across TLT;
• Update precedents in line with the Greener Litigation Pledge; and
• Ensure that TLT is doing all that it can to spot new opportunities to reduce emissions in litigation, and that it has the systems in place to support this and measure the impact.

The committee also hopes to promote change through the firm’s membership of court user groups, as well as its contacts in the judiciary and interactions with other legal professionals in litigation, such as other law firms, counsel and expert witnesses.

TLT’s pledge supports its wider plans to reduce the use of paper and carbon-intensive travel by staff both in the office and at home, including through employee engagement and awareness programmes, new firmwide policies and new tools and technologies.

Mark Routley, partner at TLT, said: “Litigation has historically been a very carbon-intensive area of law, with what we might now call an over-reliance on paper-based documents and domestic and international travel. The pandemic forced the sector to find digital alternatives to these, and we are now working hard to ensure that we don’t miss an opportunity to keep these environmental benefits going and establish a new normal that’s better for the planet.

“By establishing a committee, we will ensure that greener disputes remain front of mind across the firm and with clients, and help to find as many ways as possible to reduce carbon emissions from litigation and embed these new working practices into our day-to-day lives.”

The Greener Litigation Pledge aims to reduce the carbon footprint of court disputes in line with the objective of restricting global warming to 1.5°C as set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.