How many law firms do you recall published photos of their offices pre-pandemic?
It just wasn’t the done thing. It was indiscreet, uncouth, even, for secretive law firms to reveal too much about where it was they did their secretive work. But, nowadays, they don’t hold back. They want you to catch the full patina of the ‘inclusive’, ‘state-of-the-art’, ‘zero carbon’ qualities of their flowering-walled workspaces.
Almost as abruptly as the pandemic sparked remote working, the return to the office has come to define post-pandemic work life. Now, post-post pandemic, we have rules for returning to the office, rules being routinely broken, exasperated bosses unable to enforce unenforceable in-office rules, too fearful, sources say, of alarming talented juniors weaned onto habits and schedules tied to hybrid working.
So what do you do? You spend. You make your workspace so appealing, so hospitable that no hardened hybrid worker can say no.
We’ve seen Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison fork out plenty for its new Soho, former Twitter-HQ space; Clifford Chance plotting to go fully open-plan in its ‘collaborative’ new office; Dechert stripping away paper storage to centre its new London office on staff well-being; and offshore firm Maples Group last week relocating to a plush new ‘neuroinclusive’ workspace in the heart of London’s increasingly law firm-heavy Bishopsgate district, which this week gained another U.S. player, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.
It’s an expensive way to say ‘get back to the office’. But it’s a gamble.
Rent is among a law firm’s biggest outlays—10.5% of gross annual revenue, according to a 2023 Cushman & Wakefield report on firms in America.
Consider then, that in North America in 2023, law firms were utilising less than half of their real estate, with an overall occupancy rate of 48%. And this is despite most who have spoken on the subject in London perceiving that North American law firms are more warlike in their return-to-the-office messaging.
So how do you get folks back in without prescribing?
You transform your space. You ‘right-size’—a sanitized version of ‘down-size’ that deftly eradicates any whiff of financial ill-health.
So that’s what firms did...
