Mentorship might be best lure for getting lawyers to the office

More glass, cafe-like communal spaces and free lunch: these are just a few examples of the changes occurring within law firms to incentivize the return to the physical office.

Adam Bass, CEO and president of Buchalter PC said that the in-person engagement provided by a physical office was “meaningful,” adding that the office’s role in a lawyer “perfecting their craft” at all stages of their career had been underappreciated until the pandemic and the shift to remote work.

Rather than instituting a blanket attendance policy, the firm has simply returned to its pre-pandemic attendance policy, with some added flexibility. Although attendance varied by city and practice area, most of the firm’s staff were back to five days a week in-person.

“It’s not that it can’t be done remotely, but I think it’s a lot smoother, just works a lot better, when it’s in the office,” he said, adding that this was particularly the case for early career lawyers who could benefit from the knowledge of their senior colleagues.

“For the more senior lawyers it’s collaboration, you know, bouncing complex ideas off each other. I would say, for the associates, I don’t know how you train lawyers, without having some physical connection to them. And then having a physical connection, being in the office, [it could be] participating in a conference call and seeing the way that negotiation goes or working on briefs and getting back feedback.”

Gensler’s head of design Katie Buchanan, who regularly works with law firms on their office design, has described this learning opportunity as an amenity for employees in and of itself.

“I think some of those, especially for younger people that are early in their career, attorneys, they truly need places for mentorship. I think that’s some of the things that they’ve been missing out on. It’s almost an amenity to have the time with your people that are further on in their career that you can get mentorship from those partners,” Buchanan said.

On the topic of amenity, to ease that transition back to the office, Buchalter has instituted a range of office-based perks.

“We try to sort of entice, encourage or otherwise get people in the office by having lots of things going on in the offices,” Bass said. “We’ve got lunches, ice cream carts and happy hours – you name it.”

Part of that has been in response to the changing cityscapes legal office cohabit post-pandemic.

“Especially in places like downtown [Los Angeles], it’s, you know, a lot of our folks are not as comfortable in downtown LA [as they used to be], there aren’t as many places anymore to go eat during the day. … So, we’ve tried to bring in lunch quite often and do things that make them feel good,” Bass said.

On the East Coast, firms are going as far as providing cafeterias for staff members, Buchanan said.

“We have a couple that have done things like adding a barista bar and providing lunch, whether it’s one time a week or every day, to just really cater to having a reason for people to come into the office,” Buchanan, who regularly works with firms to outfit their offices, said.

“People, I think, really love that work cafe atmosphere. … we want to be able to provide a space for people not to always just get away from work, but a change of scenery to do work in,” she added.

Part of the post-pandemic office’s role was to rebuild a sense of community that had been lost, Buchanan said.

“We have spent so much time away from each other that people are definitely creating or craving community. The office needs to be able to support that because people are working differently than they had before COVID,” she said. This was backed up by the firm’s research showing that people are spending larger percentages of time working with others in person than they were prior to the pandemic.

“They are spending less time working alone because you think about why people are coming to the office. It’s because they have those meetings. It’s because they want to interact with each other.”

That trend has translated into new office designs that maximize shared space and recognize the importance of physical proximity in career development, particularly for early-career attorneys.

“In terms of amenities, I think that people are looking for a variety of work settings, as well as just their private office. I think we see a lot of things that people want to have the opportunity to take their laptop out of their office and have more amenities that are a bit more communal,” Buchanan said.

Other design focuses included promoting movement and mental health, with wellness rooms and fitness facilities.

“Even larger firms, we see doing some fitness areas or something as simple as a quiet place for reflection. … People also put in wellness rooms for people, if you’ve got a headache or something, to just get some really quiet head-down space. I think that there’s some other rooms that you can put in just to take a breath,” Buchanan said.

“I think the ultimate amenity is access to outdoor space, which is a little easier in Silicon Valley where we have some of the buildings that actually allow for us to have indoor-outdoor terrace spaces,” she added.

For Buchalter, which has recently opened new offices in Denver, expanded in San Diego and moved in San Francisco, design changes have been focused on creating open, shared spaces.

“It’s 100% more collaborative, more approachable, a lot more glass. It just feels, to folks, more of a welcoming environment,” he said. “For instance, [we have] outdoor spaces, like in LA … we have really nice outdoor decks so that people can eat up on the deck, and they get that outside feeling.”

As Bon Jovi sang, ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same,’ and law firms are no different. While some sectors had begun transitioning away from offering individual offices in the post-pandemic environment, law firms still bucked the trend, Buchanan said.

“Law firms are really one of the sectors that still has many offices, and there are others,” she said. What had changed, post-pandemic, is that they were more likely to make these unassigned.

This was consistent with Buchalter policy, which loosely follows a use it or lose it ethos.

“We used to give up better offices based on seniority or big important partners and now a component of it is who uses it,” he said. “We build this new fantastic office with a nice view and there’s nobody there, we’ll get somebody who is going to use it.”