Wright, Johnston & Mackenzie LLP (WJM) first engaged with the Circular Edinburgh team when Karin-Charlotte Rietdijk, Office Manager for WJM’s Edinburgh office, attended one of the Circular Edinburgh lunchtime seminars as part of the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce.

Both management and staff wished to revise office resource usage. This involved in-house discussions with Lizzie Tainsh, Planning & Environment Associate, to compose and implement an Environmental Policy for WJM.

As part of Karin and Lizzie’s follow up meetings with Circular Edinburgh, it was agreed that completing an ‘on-line circular assessment tool’ would help provide a baseline to improve office sustainability.  This online assessment tool was devised by Circle Lab in The Netherlands and is a questionnaire that prompts discussion and allows organisations to review how circular they are and where the opportunities might be within the organisation.

Left to right: Lizzie Tainsh and Karin-Charlotte Rietdijk

Completing this Assessment Tool highlighted the circular economy challenges and opportunities for the firm. Thereafter the team quickly found themselves on a pathway towards creating their own Environmental Policy.

Completion of the assessment tool provided WJM with a sound basis to:

• Encourage office engagement in relation to circular economy and sustainability, facilitating internal discussions about what was achievable by the business.
• Understand the challenges and opportunities and what in-house support is necessary to implement change. This has lead WJM towards thinking creatively to enable future actions in this area.
• Pursue a referral made to Resource Efficient Scotland, a European Regional Development Fund and Scottish Government funded service delivered by Zero Waste Scotland. This is with a view for WJM to now complete a business process and resource audit to further support this transition.

Once all the goals were collated, these were prioritised into short, medium and long term objectives, with the main focus being towards the business going ‘paper-light’. Karin and Lizzie continue to engage with the Circular Edinburgh team, building new relationships and attending further events and also talking directly with other law firms who have already benefitted from fundamental changes in their resource usage.

It is the WJM team’s ambition that their Edinburgh office will pilot the development of this new policy. Following a feedback period, the policy and objectives will then be rolled out to their Glasgow, Inverness, Dunfermline and Dunblane offices.  Circular Edinburgh consider that these changes will not only facilitate a cultural change to their organisation, but more widely, that it would influence a profession with a long-held traditional methodology towards a more suitable model. It will also allow WJM to lead the way for other Law firms to implement changes and contribute to a more resource efficient and eventually more circular way of doing business in the City.