Taking action against climate change has become a global priority. Climate change refers to the gradual and long-term alterations to weather patterns and temperatures. According to the UN, since the 1800s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change. The effects of climate change are becoming more pervasive and detrimental, affecting not only the environment, but also the local communities affected by climate events (which can include droughts, fires, flooding, storms and a decline in local - and global - biodiversity).
As the threat of climate change grows, so too does the drive to reduce the world's carbon footprint. Governments, global institutions and household name companies are now increasingly keen to be perceived as environmentally-friendly and as entities at the forefront of the fight against global warming. Multinational corporations have been under intense scrutiny since the environment assumed a status of importance on the world's agenda. Companies who contribute heavily to climate change can no longer expect to do so with impunity and without risking significant reputational damage. The legal industry has started to take notice of these issues, and is unsurprisingly itself a significant contributor to climate change. International law firms tend to have large carbon footprints. In particular, lawyers at these firms generate five to ten times the amount of pages of paper per year than a typical office worker. Many of these papers are contracts, drafts and other legal documents that are often filed away in bulk. Paper (and its production) is a particularly big polluter. It takes 10 litres of water to produce a single A4 sheet of paper, and its production also contributes to deforestation, waste and water and air pollution.
Curious about automated data extraction from documents?
How Legislate is reducing the carbon footprint of the law
While other companies begin to develop action plans to help them go green, Legislate is already reducing the carbon footprint of the law.
Legislate allows users to create digital contracts. Contracts created on Legislate's platform are signed, negotiated, amended and managed on the platform, so there is no need for each party to print out and retain its own copy of the contract. Users who create contracts in bulk will also no longer have to file them physically or print out and distribute multiple copies for signature. Once signed, the contract will be stored directly on the platform. This eliminates the need for businesses to manually print out and file their contracts, which will instead be secure on Legislate's platform and can be downloaded electronically if needed.
The ability to negotiate a contract on a digital platform means that Legislate's users no longer have to physically travel to meetings to engage in the negotiation process. This reduces their carbon emissions.
Legislate also displays key contract metrics online, meaning that users no longer have to create additional paperwork to store and try to manually track the key data in their contracts.
Also, all contracts concluded on Legislate are signed digitally. This eliminates the need to print out documents for signature and means that documents do not have to be printed and scanned.
Any stage of the contracting process that can be done on paper can be done digitally on Legislate. Switching to Legislate means that your legal operations will instantly become paperless.