In early 2022, Garvish Immigration Law Group created three committees to help keep employees motivated and passionate. The committees are: Happiest Law Firm, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion, and Garvish Goes Green. Each committee takes time to meet monthly to discuss initiatives, projects, and how to reinforce their mission statement.

The Garvish Goes Green Committee, led by Mercy Oladosu, is our earth-friendly, environmentally conscious committee dedicated to lowering the carbon footprint of our office and focused on committing the team to more sustainable practices. One of the first initiatives of Garvish Goes Green is to go entirely paperless! This is a monumental task for an immigration firm with tons of filing documents dating all the way back to 2009.  

Mercy Oladosu, Committee Leader of the Garvish Goes Green Team

So today is the day! Today we finally said good-bye to our old paper-filled filing system. The Garvish Goes Green committee spent weeks combing through decades of old paper documents, scanning all the documents for digital filing, taking off all staples and clips, and sorting them into bins for reuse. We have partnered with a service to collect the papers for shredding and recycling. This project is only the first step towards an environmentally friendly Garvish Immigration office! 

As the committee leader, Mercy Oladosu, led this project and coordinated efforts for everyone in the office to pitch in. All the individual office recycling bins were collected and sifted through. All the filing cabinets were opened and emptied. These tasks, while seemingly tedious, were made into a collaborative effort with round-table discussions simultaneously happening over meetings and lunch-ins. In total, 15 boxes of files were collected to be shredded and recycled, weighing a total of 415lbs! For a small office, this task was a big feat! Two entire metal cabinets of folders and papers were able to be reduced and recycled and the filing cabinets are now being donated. 

We asked Mercy how she felt when Phase One of the Shredding Project was complete:

“Inspired! This was such a huge project and at first I didnt know how we would complete it. But we worked as a team, got it done, and we are better prepared for bigger projects in the future!”

We have a lot of work ahead of us as an immigration law firm. Our clients are required to submit documents sometimes totalling 500 pages! We have switched to secure online legal filing softwares such as Mycase and Docketwise to help cut back on the amount of paper documents we must physically collect. This effort has helped our clients prepare documents faster, with less stress, zero postage, and zero delivery fees.