CUSTOMER CASE STUDY

Freshfields | Legal | United Kingdom

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP
International Law Firm Reduces Desktop PC Power Consumption By 34% and
Saves £85,000 in Energy Costs

The Problem

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP is one of the world's leading international law firms, with more than 2,400 lawyers working across 28 offices in 16 countries providing comprehensive worldwide service to national and multinational corporations, financial institutions and governments. In 2007, the firm announced that it would become carbon neutral across all its offices by off-setting its carbon emissions and taking additional steps to reduce its energy consumption.

The move to carbon neutrality is just one part of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer’s corporate social responsibility programme, which spans the firm’s community volunteering, pro bono, environmental, diversity and health and safety commitments and activities.

Although the organisation uses a number of sources of clean and renewable fuels, the IT department was tasked with exploring additional solutions for reducing power consumption associated with technology use covering all business units across the globe. The project would also be driven by the members of the various green teams that have been established in the firms practice groups and business service areas to help drive forward a commitment to reducing its contribution to climate change. However, any power management solution would also need to minimise impact to the day-to-day operations of the business while providing accurate and consistent reporting on the energy saved.

The Challenge

As Riaan Husselmann, Programme Manager at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP, explains “We contacted IT Energy and they seemed very knowledgeable and focused on what we needed to do and the criteria involved, so we invited them in to conduct an energy audit,”

Using Verdiem’s unique measuring features the team from IT Energy conducted an energy audit to uncover usage patterns and software compatibility. The resulting data provided the firm with detailed reports on how much energy could be saved across the desktop PC environment. Following a short pilot of PC’s within the IT department, it was clear the Verdiem SURVEYOR solution would meet all the operational needs.

“We then began a process of explaining and getting ‘buy-in’ from our 5500 users on what we were intending to do, how it would help us meet our goal to become carbon neutral and how the technology worked,” Husselmann continues.

Solution

With partners and staff on-board, the project to roll out the Verdiem SURVEYOR software to a further 20 sites across the world took only three weeks, successfully deploying to 5,566 desktop PC’s, “The project is one of the smoothest we have ever had,” comments Husselmann, “There were only 2 machines on which the software did not work but this should be resolved in an upcoming patch.”
From an IT management prospective, local software updates and installs can still be initiated as the energy management software supports common “wake-on-LAN” functionality. In terms of user interaction, the helpdesk has received only a handful of minor support issues regarding the software, all of which have been successfully resolved.

Results

“The Verdiem SURVEYOR solution has already cut the power consumption of 5,566 of our desktop PC’s by 34% which equates to a yearly saving of 922,268 kWh of energy, 396,575kg Co2 and around £85,000 from our energy bill.” He comments.

In addition, to saving nearly a megawatt of energy per year, the project reduced company wide CO2 equivalent emissions by just over 4% based on its externally audited 2006/7 level of 19635 tonnes . “We also had a number of users prefer the software over having to manually turn off and restart machines as the operating system restarts a lot faster than Windows’ standard boot up procedure,” he adds.

The partners at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer have deemed the project a success. With a return on investment period of roughly 11 months, the technology has proven itself an extremely cost effective solution.