More legal conferences are experimenting with ways to reduce their environmental footprint, and it turns out doing so might not be all that difficult—or expensive.

Last week's Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) institute in Las Vegas addressed the issue head-on during the registration phase. Instead of the usual ID card tucked into a plastic sleeve, attendees signing in at the Bellagio hotel received a card with pre-punched holes at the top designed to accommodate a ready supply of double-ended lanyards.

CLOC president Mary O'Carroll said she was surprised anyone even took note of the missing plastic, which was also a feature of CLOC's 2019 London Institute, held in January. There had been some initial concern during the planning stages that guests who liked to use the sleeve to store business cards would be disappointed, but loftier ambitions eventually prevailed.

“We figured that when there are thousands of attendees, every little thing matters. We all have to do what we can, and no step is too little,” O'Carroll said.

It also helped that ID badges weren't the only area where the CLOC leadership decided to try and drop an environmental shoe-size. For example, instead of printing out enough maps to line the pockets of each and every attendee, they relied more heavily upon limited but smartly-placed signage and encouraged people to make use of the event's mobile app.

Even the pens circulating the conference were made from 100 percent recyclable materials. According to O'Carroll, it wasn't at all difficult to incorporate environmental considerations into the event's planning process.

“Any time a decision is made, we thought consciously about the impact we would be having. I think it's just something that the entire team believes in and the decisions were easy ones. In fact, it's often more cost effective to go the environmental route anyway,” O'Carroll said.

In other words, sometimes you have to go green to save green. The theory will be put to the test in Orlando come August, where the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) will host ILTACON 2019, a four-day educational conference that this time around will provide guests with a stainless steel cup upon registration along with instructions on how to use it for the entire week.

Facilitating that usage will be an abundance of pitchers instead of the usual plastic water bottles. Dawn Hudgins, ILTA's vice president of events and conferences, doesn't have final numbers to crunch yet, but is confident that the switch will translate into more than just environmental savings. A single stainless steel cup will cost ILTA less than $5, which Hudgins estimated would equate to the cost of roughly a bottle and a half of water.

“Each individual at this conference is going to consume more than a bottle and a half of water over the course of five days,” Hudgins said.

The leadership teams behind ILTA or CLOC aren't the first to begin thinking more deeply about the environmental impact of legal conferences. An initiative called Gag-the-Swag was launched earlier this year by a small group of erstwhile legal tech vendors trying to reduce the amount of free promotional items that are handed out at conferences and inevitably end up in a trash bin somewhere.

Still, from Hudgins' perspective, environmental awareness at conferences is just beginning to attain “trend” status—and that's good.

“There's a lot of money and a lot of waste at conferences just because of the consumables alone. And so if there's a way to minimize that, we're definitely all for it,” Hudgins said.