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Environmentally friendly business practices help the Earth but can also improve your firm's bottom line. BY IAN HARVEY BIG GUNS GO GREEN of Ogilvy Renault LLP's clean-tech team, which specializes in providing legal ser- vices for innovative environmental en- trepreneurs. "We started to notice that on a lot of request for proposals they were asking about sustainable policies," he says, and, given Ogilvy Renault's foot- print in the sector, there was no way they could "talk the talk unless we walked the walk." Taylor teamed up with another of C the firm's veteran environmental law- yers, Jean Piette, a senior partner in the Montreal office and chairman of the environmental law team, and made ould going green boost billables? Definitely, says Andrew A. Taylor, an energy and envi- ronmental practitio- ner and co-chairman a presentation to the board that was quickly supported. Since then, the pair has been developing ideas and solutions and looking at other best practices be- ing deployed by law firms across North America. However, closer to home, the response and contribution of ideas from peers and employees was overwhelming, they say, and an indication that it's an idea whose time has come. "A lot of what we're doing now is as- sessing what kind of things can be done and what the impact is of things like business travel," said Piette, who in 1972 became the first lawyer in Quebec to develop a practice devoted entirely to environmental law. "It's important that we have a sustainable policy, because there are a number of clients telling us that they like to do business with other sustainable businesses. There are clients 48 SEPTEMBER 2008 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com who require all their suppliers to have sustainable policies in place. This is the direction things are going." Sometimes it's the simple stuff, says Taylor, who admits to going around turning off lights in empty boardrooms. Sometimes it takes a longer, more com- plex plan. With the Montreal office moving into new facilities next year, a window of opportunity opened for the firm to look not just at its space require- ments but also at the environmental im- pact of its new offices. "There are going to be showers there, so people can clean up after cycling to work," says Piette. "And we're looking at where the hard- wood floors come from. We'd like them to be local or at least from a fast-growing sustainable plant like bamboo." Being green in deed, and not just word, is a natural extension of corporate