Biglaw

Remote Working Isn’t Just A Perk Anymore

Embrace that fact, or brace for impact.

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Last year’s pandemic-prompted transition to remote working was a stressful move of necessity for most firms. Seemingly overnight, the streets were empty, grocery stores looked like scenes out of a zombie apocalypse movie, and we were all stuck trying to figure out how to do our jobs over Zoom with kids and pets running through the background.

Our industry mostly got it figured out over the following year, shifting our practices online, cutting back on expenses to reflect the newly dispersed employee pool, and embracing new technology. All it took was a global pandemic to force our deeply tradition-bound industry to embrace rapid transformational change.

Yet even today, there remain more than a few managing partners I’ve spoken with who believe everything is going to return back to the way it was pre-pandemic with everyone onsite. What’s more, they’re aggressively pushing for the same.

Respectfully, that’s like aggressively pushing for 35 mm film, pagers, fax machines, cassette tapes, and carrier pigeons to make a resurgence.

 What You Don’t See Might Kill You

Remote working isn’t just here to stay: it’s an increasingly necessary component to running a smart, modern firm. Firms that fail to embrace some level of flexible working on a long-term basis do so at their own peril.

The coming years pose a different kind of danger for law firms, one that’s better hidden and the kind we’re generally less equipped to anticipate and address. The economy is rebounding, and law firms appear to have weathered the worst of the storm. When things seem good and bad times are in the rear-view mirror, it’s deeply tempting in our traditional industry to want to retreat to the way things used to be.

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For most firms, that would be falling into a trap of our own making. Returning to the expectation of five days of face time a week is a recipe for attrition, high overhead, client loss, and, perhaps surprisingly, reduced productivity.

Busting The Productivity Myth

Let’s start by busting a big myth out of the gate. When many of us think of remote workers, we imagine people in pajamas watching Netflix and sipping a cup of homemade coffee while the rest of the workforce slaves away in the office doing the actual work of the company. The funny thing is, study after study after study after study keep coming back with results showing that the pajama-wearing work-from-homers are overall more productive than their in-office counterparts. Those results seem to track whether the workers are low-skilled consumer call center workers or highly skilled knowledge workers like attorneys.

It’s not difficult to intuit potential reasons for the productivity boost. Eliminating wasted time is a big one. Workers who don’t have to commute tend to log into work earlier and stay online later. They also spend less time on chit-chat and office gossip, instead focusing more on the work at hand. In fact, we’re beginning to recognize that one of the risks of remote working isn’t failure to produce — it’s burnout from working too hard.

Lower Bills, More Clients, Better Talent

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Having workers at home also allows firms to tamp down their expenses significantly. Fewer on-site people means firms require less real estate, which is generally the biggest nonpayroll item on a firm’s budget. Lower expenses translate directly to higher profits, as recognized by industry leaders such as Perkins Coie, Womble Bond Dickinson, and Husch Blackwell, all of which have pivoted hard into flexible remote work environments and reduced real estate footprints — with many more following suit by the day.

Beyond just the real estate savings are the day-to-day expenses of physical offices. Toner and paper, meals ordered in for meetings, attorney lounge snacks, and more can all be significantly reduced by shifting employees from the office to their homes. Every dollar saved on an expense sheet is a dollar more of profit, and all those small expenses add up to big checks given enough time.

What’s more, the recruiting and client development teams within firms that fail to adapt will see a growing competitive disadvantage compared to firms that embrace flexibility. When talent is looking for somewhere to lateral to, flexibility is going to trump nonflexibility every time. Clients also want to see their interests are being handled by dynamic, contemporary law firms that understand the current moment. Firms that are stuck in the past, keeping overhead high and presumably passing the expense on to the client, are going to be far less appealing than agile firms with their fingers on the pulse.

The Culture Question

I’m a longtime advocate for developing and maintaining a firm’s unique culture. Remote-working skeptics might reasonably wonder how developing culture, which is often so dependent on face-to-face interaction, can continue in a remote-focused law firm. I would counter that failing to embrace remote working arrangements runs more of a risk of damaging a firm’s culture in the long run.

Employees who feel like management is out of touch with mainstream trends have less of a reason to trust in that management to lead them. Even worse, management can come off as callous toward their teams’ desires for more flexibility, creating a divide that’s hard to cross. Many partners still operate on the assumption that if someone’s not working onsite, they’re not working. That position boils down to trust, which is the cornerstone of any strong culture.

Let’s not fool ourselves: there will be a small percentage of people who abuse remote working rules. That said, having spoken with many managing partners at firms across the country about this topic, I can tell you that there are also plenty of people who abuse rules in the physical office. You don’t have to be working from home to surf the web, gab all day with co-workers, or generally get nothing done. Good management isn’t focused on setting a firmwide policy around a small percentage of bad actors; it’s instead setting policy to enable the majority of workers to be their best, most productive selves. Those who aren’t productive or following rules need to be dealt with on an individual basis whether they are in the office or at home.

Flex Days Are A Flex

Not every attorney will want, or be able, to work remotely every day. Some attorneys and legal professionals will genuinely thrive in a professional work environment far more than they will working remotely, especially new workers trying to get their feet under them. Some employees may not have home environments that are conducive to remote work, either due to a lack of dedicated workspace, an overabundance of housemates, lack of reliable home internet, or other reasons. Some workers may want four days at home for every day in the office, while some may want the opposite.

The key aspect of remote work we need to embrace as an industry is flexibility and hybridization. Not everyone can have their ideal situation, but many more can and should have it than do today. Meeting those diverse needs is both good management and good business.

As always, it comes down to the choice between embracing change or watching our competitors race ahead. There will undoubtedly be some firms that double down on the past — dragging all attorneys and employees back into the office full time in an effort to recapture the model of yesterday. The difference today is those employees have options in a market that is increasingly embracing remote working. Smart firms will realize that this trend is here to stay and will do everything they can to improve technology and set policies that keeps the best of the pre-pandemic, in-office world while reaping the benefits from the remote new world.

Which kind of firm do you want to be?

James Goodnow is the CEO and managing partner of NLJ 250 firm Fennemore Craig. At age 36, he became the youngest known chief executive of a large law firm in the U.S. He holds his JD from Harvard Law School and dual business management certificates from MIT. He’s currently attending the Cambridge University Judge Business School (U.K.), where he’s working toward a master’s degree in entrepreneurship. James is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management new release category. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at James@JamesGoodnow.com.

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