Your firm's sustainability claims and your AI use have started to arrive in the same conversation, and a practice point published in the Law Society Gazette on 7 August 2026 argues that the profession has not yet joined them together. Avneet Baryan, a senior associate at Mills and Reeve, sets out how firms have debated AI on productivity, supervision and risk while running their environmental commitments as a separate exercise with its own reporting and its own page on the website. The two meet in one place, which is the energy behind every prompt your people send.
Every prompt runs on something physical
AI feels weightless in a way that office space, paper and business travel do not. Nobody in the building sees the data centre, the computing that produces a summary in nine seconds or the cooling that keeps the racks from failing, so none of it lands on the page where the mileage sits. The infrastructure is real even when it stays invisible to the person typing, and the demand grows with every model that replaces a smaller one.
What evidence there is looks poor. The Thomson Reuters Foundation's AI Corporate Data Initiative examined 1,000 companies across 13 sectors and found that 97% failed to consider the environmental impact of their AI systems, meaning energy consumption and carbon footprint, when they made deployment decisions. Read that for what it is, a global sample drawn from every kind of business rather than a survey of solicitors' firms. Baryan's own conclusion is that whether the legal sector has approached the question differently is not yet clear, which is a fair reading of a profession that has published a great deal on hallucinations and almost nothing on kilowatts.
Where your firm gets asked
The question tends to arrive from outside before anyone inside raises it. Corporate clients run supplier questionnaires, panel reviews ask what sits behind your environmental reporting, and a firm that publishes a net zero target invites the follow-up about how it counts what it uses. If your environmental statement covers travel, paper and the office lights while your fee earners run AI across most of the working day, the statement describes a firm you have stopped being.
The practice point suggests junior lawyers will raise it first, being among the heaviest users of the tools and a main audience for what the firm says about its values. The questions it sets out are practical rather than ideological. How does growing AI use sit alongside the commitments the firm has made, is AI treated as part of the environmental picture or only as a technology matter, and what has anyone asked suppliers about energy and emissions.
What a smaller firm should do
None of this argues against adopting AI. The efficiencies hold, clients expect you to use the technology where it suits the work, and a firm that withdrew from it on environmental grounds would lose the argument and the work. What it argues against is an environmental position that quietly leaves out the fastest growing part of what your firm consumes.
Three steps cover it at your size. Name AI in your environmental framework, so that the subject exists on paper instead of falling between the IT policy and the responsible business page. Put whoever runs technology, whoever handles procurement and whoever owns the environmental reporting in one conversation each year, which in most firms means three people and an hour. Then add the energy question to the supplier questionnaire you already send on security and data protection, asking where the computing runs, what the provider publishes on energy and emissions, and whether it will give you figures for your own usage.
Keep your public wording inside what you can evidence. For most firms the honest answer this year is that they do not know their AI footprint and cannot get it from their suppliers. Saying so, and setting out what you are doing to find out, stands up better under a client's questions than a target that ignores the subject.
The argument is set out by Avneet Baryan of Mills and Reeve in AI and the elephant in the room, published by the Law Society Gazette on 7 August 2026. The deployment figure comes from the Thomson Reuters Foundation's AI Corporate Data Initiative analysis of 1,000 companies, reported on 23 February 2026.
If you want your environmental wording and your AI plan to say the same thing before a client asks you to reconcile them: talk it through with us.