We are dedicated to making improvements that foster a sustainable future and lead to social and economic improvements within our firm, in our surrounding areas, and for all our stakeholders in the interest of long-term sustainability, social responsibility, and environmental integrity.

At Cleary, we promote green-friendly practices and pursue voluntary initiatives toward the goal of minimizing the firm’s impact on our environment. We are continually evaluating new ways to improve our operations and achieve better environmental performance by taking steps to reduce waste, manage consumption of water and electricity, and monitor the environmental impact of our buildings and our travel.

In support of these initiatives, we have formed a cross-functional working group tasked with accelerating our global sustainability efforts. Our cross-functional working group is exploring ways to further reduce the firm’s carbon footprint through augmented efforts to measure our emissions, set and socialize reduction targets, and devise metrics to track improvements.

2021 – 2024 Actions

  • In 2021, we worked with a third-party consultant to enhance our internal sustainability efforts. At the outset of the project, the consultants led us through strategic exercises to evaluate our firm’s existing ESG program. This involved industry benchmarking, an internal gap assessment, and a stakeholder-driven materiality assessment. Taken together, these sources of information served to highlight areas for development within our firm’s existing ESG practices, as well as to identify priorities as our firm considers action moving forward.
  • In 2022, we undertook a global initiative to calculate greenhouse gas emissions for 2019, 2020 and 2021. These calculations have helped us to understand high sources of emissions within our operations. These results served as the foundation of our recently developed Climate Action Plan, which identifies future action to mitigate our carbon footprint across scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. In 2023, the firm continued to enhance its global Climate Action Plan by providing each office with action plans specific to the emissions profiles of their operations.
  • We recognize the importance of setting a goal to measure progress of these reduction efforts. For this reason, we have recently submitted a letter of commitment to the Science Based Target Initiative (SBTi) and have set both near and long-term science-based emissions reduction targets to be validated by SBTi in the coming months, with a goal of reaching net-zero emissions much sooner than 2050.  As we work toward decarbonizing our operations, the firm has purchased carbon credits annually to cover a portion of the firm’s emission since 2021, which we plan to do so going forward in our pursuit of net-zero operations. We have also recently started an initiative to increase the transparency on the sustainability performance and the ecological footprint of our supply chain. To facilitate this effort, the Firm has chosen EcoVadis to conduct individual sustainability performance assessments of our suppliers.
  • We are a member of the Law Firm Sustainability Network, the Legal Sustainability Alliance, the Net Zero Lawyer Alliance and Trellis Network (formerly the GreenBiz Executive Network). We disclose annually to CDP and EcoVadis.