The hidden environmental cost of emailing and why firms should care

Email may seem harmless, but every message adds up. Here’s why law firms should include email in their ESG strategy.

6 min read

Law firms have made strong progress in sustainability in recent years. From switching to paperless practices to reducing business travel, many have already taken visible steps toward a more responsible future. Often, it is the partners who are driving these efforts, recognising that ESG is no longer a side topic. It shapes how clients choose legal advisers, how rankings assess performance, and how future talent evaluates a firm.

But there is one area that continues to go unnoticed: emailing.

This article is not about pointing fingers. It is about raising awareness and helping partners understand a small, often invisible contributor to their firm’s carbon footprint. Emailing may feel like the cleanest form of communication, but every message we send or receive carries an environmental cost.

If you are a partner who cares about your firm’s reputation and long-term strategy, this is worth your attention. And it is likely something you will want to ask your legal marketing and communications team to act on.

The hidden cost of digital communication

A short email without an attachment produces about 0.3 grams of COâ‚‚. Add a PDF, photo, or large document, and it can rise to 50 grams or more. While this might seem negligible, consider the volume of emails being sent and stored each day across a law firm. The numbers add up quickly.

Behind every message lies a network of servers, energy-hungry data centres, and the power used by devices to draft, send, and store messages. Globally, email traffic is estimated to contribute to over 150 million tonnes of COâ‚‚ per year.

If every person reduced their email traffic by just 1 percent, the global carbon footprint could fall by 16 million tonnes annually.

For a profession built on communication, this should be a wake-up call.

What this has to do with legal marketing

Marketing is about more than just visibility. It’s about trust and values too. When firms talk about sustainability externally, they need to show that those values are reflected in daily behaviour.

Legal marketers play a key role here. They manage messaging, build brand reputation and often sit at the centre of internal cultural change. Sustainable emailing practices may seem like a small detail, but they send a powerful signal.

If your firm publicly champions ESG but floods inboxes with oversized attachments, endless CCs and unread newsletters, clients and employees will notice the disconnect. And in a competitive legal market, that mismatch can undermine even the strongest external messaging.

Legal marketing is email-heavy, and that’s a problem

Marketing and communications teams are among the heaviest users of email in law firms. They manage newsletter campaigns, internal updates, client alerts, announcements, and rankings communications.

The solution isn’t to stop marketing, but to market smarter.

The good news is that your firm’s marketing team is well placed to lead change. They already understand the tone of your brand, the expectations of clients, and how your ESG strategy is presented externally. What they may need is a signal from the top that this is something worth reviewing.

Where to start: simple, sustainable steps

Here are a few common email practices that can be improved without much effort or cost.

1. Unsubscribe from newsletters you no longer read

Encourage your teams to do a digital declutter. Unsubscribing from irrelevant updates reduces inbox volume and saves energy on storage. From a marketing perspective, it also improves open rates and reduces bouncebacks.

2. Be selective with CC and BCC

Copying a long list of colleagues into every message may feel efficient, but often it adds confusion and unnecessary digital clutter. Ask whether each recipient genuinely needs to receive the message.

This applies just as much to client communication. Shorter, more focused email threads are easier to read, easier to track and more aligned with thoughtful, professional service.

3. Avoid sending heavy attachments when possible

Sending pitch decks, brochures or PDF updates by email is standard practice, but it is often more efficient to provide a download link or upload files to a secure portal. This reduces energy usage and gives clients a better user experience.

4. Rethink seasonal e-cards

Digital holiday cards are common in law firms, but their environmental impact is often underestimated. Especially those with embedded videos or animations can add significantly to energy use. A more meaningful alternative might be a handwritten card to select clients or a charitable donation in the name of your firm.

What partners can do: start the conversation

You do not need to overhaul your firm’s IT infrastructure or introduce a formal policy. But as a partner, you are in a position to ask the right questions.

Could your firm reduce its email volume through better targeting? Could your marketing team lead a review of current practices? Could your ESG reporting include operational choices like these?

Often, the teams already have the ideas. They are simply waiting for the go-ahead. With encouragement from leadership, legal marketers can refine how the firm communicates internally and externally in ways that support both performance and sustainability.

This is also about reputation

Clients, foreign counsel and future employees are all watching how firms deliver on their values. It is no longer enough to include a line about ESG in your pitch materials. Firms need to show how those values are put into practice.

Taking email seriously as a sustainability issue shows attention to detail. It demonstrates that your firm does not only do the big things, but also the small things well. That level of care and consistency is what sets trusted firms apart.

A final word

Digital behaviour might not feel like the most obvious starting point for ESG progress, but it is one of the simplest. With a few practical changes, you can reduce waste, improve communication quality, and support your firm’s broader sustainability goals.

If you are a partner reading this and thinking, “We could do better here,†the next step is a leadership-level discussion.

This is not something that marketing can solve in isolation. Thoughtful, sustainable communication practices, including how your firm uses email, need to be considered at leadership level, as part of your broader ESG and operational strategy.

Because in a profession where every message counts, sometimes the most meaningful one is the one you choose not to send.