Freshfields

Who are Freshfields?

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP (“Freshfields”) is a global law firm. It has 28 offices in 17 jurisdictions across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America. It advises national and multinational corporations, financial institutions and governments.

Freshfields have been publicly reporting GHG emissions since 2012, and when Ecometrica began discussing their data collection and reporting needs, the company was managing data collection using spreadsheets. Its origins can be traced back to the early 18th century, when it was appointed solicitor to the Bank of England. It continues to advise the Bank of England today.

What They Wanted

Whilst spreadsheets are flexible to set up, they offer limited capabilities beyond data storage and basic, manual reporting. They also require a significant time investment to administer, collate data and report from. As Freshfields looked to their future reporting requirements, there was concern that this approach was no longer fit for purpose.

Freshfields had a number of areas that they were looking to improve on from within their existing processes, specifically maintenance of emissions factors, robustness of data collection and calculation, live centralised monitoring of performance and compilation of data for reporting to frameworks such as CDP. Furthermore, Freshfields hoped to deliver these improvements alongside internal time savings.

To achieve these goals, Freshfields were seeking an intuitive, robust, efficient and auditable platform with the capability to report on scope 1, 2 and 3 GHG and waste, paper and water reporting requirements, for its 27 offices in 16 countries around the world.

Having reviewed their options, Freshfields chose the Ecometrica Platform to allow them to manage their reporting.

What We Did

Ecometrica’s Sustainability modules allow Freshfields to report on consumption and emissions data in real time, reduce the effort required to produce sustainability reports and improve the visibility and management of their sustainability data.

Along with reporting for energy in buildings, business travel, paper consumption, waste and water, Freshfields are using the Ecometrica Platform’s Business Intelligence module to track progress against their four key environmental targets:

• Reduce emissions from office energy use
• Reduce emissions from travel
• Reduce paper use
• Phase out single-use plastics

The Ecometrica platform speeds and simplifies the process of third party verification of data, providing full visibility of emission factors, comments from data entry users and supporting evidence, clear change control and robust update processes.

Finally, the Ecometrica Platform is supported by a dedicated expert team of sustainability analysts providing support for Freshfields in reporting their environmental impacts.