Econetix and AKELA Attorneys at Law close the 2025 balance sheet.
Most sustainability stories in professional services start with a client requirement or a regulation. This one did not.
AKELA Attorneys at Law calculated its 2025 carbon footprint without a compliance obligation and without a client demanding it. In August 2026 the firm received its Retirement Certificate from Econetix, covering the emissions of its 2025 business year.
For a law firm the volume is never going to be a headline. What counts is that it was measured, documented and verifiable.
A footprint that hides in plain sight
Law firms have no production line and no fleet of trucks, which is precisely why the footprint tends to go unexamined. In practice it sits in travel to clients and courts, energy for the offices, IT infrastructure and daily operations.
None of it looks dramatic in isolation. Together it is a measurable annual volume, and most of it is only partly avoidable. A hearing still has to be attended, a server still has to run.
That is where many organisations stop. AKELA treated it as the point where responsibility starts rather than ends.
Measure first, then decide
Econetix worked with AKELA along the same sequence we apply to every client, whether it is a football club, a private equity portfolio or a twenty person law firm.
Measure the operational footprint for the business year. Identify what can realistically be reduced, which in professional services means travel policy, energy contracts and IT lifecycle. Then make a voluntary contribution to certified climate projects for the volume that remains hard to avoid, and document it in a public registry.
The order matters. A contribution without a measurement is a donation with a marketing function. A measurement without a contribution leaves the remainder untouched.
The project behind the certificate
The contribution is backed by the Econetix Climate Project Portfolio, a curated mix of certified climate projects rather than a single project. In this case the focus was a cookstove project in Uganda, registered under the Gold Standard, where efficient stoves replace open fires: less wood burned, fewer emissions, far less harmful smoke inside people’s homes.
The effect goes far beyond CO2. The project holds certified impacts across seven UN Sustainable Development Goals, from cleaner air and better health to affordable clean energy, hours saved for women and girls who otherwise collect firewood, local jobs and income.
Every credit is tracked in a public registry and permanently retired, so it cannot be resold or counted twice.
Martin Kollar – AKELA
“We reduce our emissions wherever we can. And we take responsibility for what remains: travelling to clients, energy for our office. With Econetix we have a partner that measures our footprint and offsets it through high-integrity climate projects with verified impact.”
Ready to close your own 2025?
Whether you are a law firm, an agency or an industrial group, the path is the same: measure the footprint, build a reduction strategy, and contribute to certified projects for what remains.
Econetix is a Vienna headquartered Carbon Asset Manager with offices in Abu Dhabi and Kampala, working across Carbon Project Development, dMRV project monitoring and ESG Advisory.
