"He works from home, as does almost everyone. It is just no fun, and there is really no law firm at all. Just a bunch of people logging in. That is why he is interviewing with me — because he wants a place to go where he has friends and human interaction.... At my firm, I am proud to say — and, indeed, the whole point of the firm — is that we are together. We are having fun with each other. We all have friends here. We are a team. We are in the office partly to do work, and partly so we can all add value to each other. Professional value, emotional value, inspirational value, value when we are down to get picked up, value to have the thrill of teaching and being taught, and every other kind of value. Yes, we have bad days of stress, but overall it is fun to be in our office with our friends.... If you are the employer — the partners — you need to make sure your office is one that people want to go to. Or they won’t go in, and as I said, it is game over, sooner or later."
From "Work From Home = Dead Law Firm/Working at home, to your bosses, can make you seem nothing more than a fungible billing unit" by Bruce M. Stachenfeld (Above the Law).
(I only clicked through to that article because of the picture, which was displayed in a much larger version at Facebook. It accounts for my use of the "men in shorts" tag.)
ADDED: The linked article takes the extrovert's perspective and much of human life has been structured around the preferences and capabilities of the extrovert. The lockdown imposed the structuring that would have been chosen all along by the introverts — if only they'd been vocal and active enough to structure the lives of others the way they would structure it for themselves. Now, the extroverts want to deprive them of working conditions that served them well. The extroverts presume the are the normal we've got to get back to.
I can't watch the TV show "The Office" because office life makes me feel bad, but isn't the opinion expressed in that article pretty close to the attitude expressed by the boss on that show: "We are having fun with each other. We all have friends here. We are a team. We are in the office partly to do work, and partly so we can all add value to each other...."
When you are the guy who says things like that, you don't understand how it feels to those who don't say things like that.
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This is so, so true!
I’m a solo in an executive office building. There is one other lawyer. We talk and help each other nearly every day. She’s been invaluable to me.
I'm retired, but my old law firm is similarly essentially empty. It provides free lunch on Tuesdays to induce lawyers and staff to come in once a week. It is about 50% successful. A number of attorneys have relocated to remote locations as they see no reason to live in the area.
I’m in- house with an essential industry company. At the start of quarantine, my company decided that, because our true backbone workers couldn’t stay home, none of us should, so we never stopped going in, though we masked and zoomed and tried to keep away from each other. There were a few weeks where we were closed doors and keep clear of all human contact, where I’d probably rather just worked from home, but for the rest, I’ve been so glad. I was at a conference last week, and was shocked at how many of my fellow lawyers are working remote.
My team knows each other and have worked together for a while, but I can’t imagine what full at home is for the young and new folks. I wouldn’t bet on it being a common thing long-term.
My oldest is only a couple of years into his career, and he, like so many of his generation, thought that remote work was awesome - but I hope he's coming around to this view, which is also mine, now: remote work deprives you. It deprives you of friends, yes, but also of mentoring, of serendipitous learning opportunities, of networking, of the chance to get your superiors to see you as a person with abilities and potential.
I'm afraid for him as this recession gets underway.
I worked in a inner city hospital through the pandemic.
The meetings with the suits, to the extent that they occurred, were on zoom, but the real work, by doctors and nurses, went on in meatspace. We, the meat movers, were masked and gowned, but it did no good. Many of us got the virus and a couple died. Most recovered, and went back to work.
We do not look back on that time as fun, or anything that we would ever want to do again, but there is a certain St. Crispin's Day air to the memory. It was almost worth it to have a few days free of suits.
Now they need us more than ever.
Unintended Consequences #184,952,974: COVID lockdowns inadvertently destroyed the urban economic model, the on-site university model, and the economic futures of mostly Blue areas. Blue areas simultaneously cut law enforcement, which also drove away many sympathetic people who'd otherwise love to live in cities.
With remote work why are we spending billions on office buildings with 35% occupancy? Why are we spending billions on (never profitable) public transit when no one commutes? Why are more and more people able to earn two full-time salaries by working from home?
COVID lockdowns caused an accidental great leap forward -- and they devastated centuries of urban/left-wing planning.
I don't disagree that there's a certain collegial value in working at the office, but as a lawyer at a government agency, that's an intangible and relatively minor consideration. My practice requires very little face-to-face interaction. My clients are other office workers, and I have always talked to them by phone, even before the pandemic; they don't come over to meet in person. I work my cases alone, for the most part, occasionally sending mass emails looking for a model go-by document. I send work to my supervisor electronically. 95% of what I do can be handled just fine at home. I'm not angling for promotion. There are times where it helps to consult with a colleague, but I can do that by phone too. It's a hassle getting dressed up and commuting into town, and the payoff of saying hello in person to a few people whom I may or may not know all that well is not that high.
My office is still developing a return to work plan. Indications are it will be a tiered system, with different expectations for different jobs. It seems that most employees, at least at first, will only come in a couple times a month.
Why bother? With such a limited return policy, you still have to keep all your things at home and bring them in with you for your "in-office" days. You come back to an empty office, so meetings are still on zoom and you're the only person at the water cooler (and you will have to wear a mask while you stand there alone because all areas away from your desk will still require masking).
Of course the boss thinks it's fun to be in the office. He gets waited on and treated like a little king. Everyone acts like his friend. He thinks his every fatuous remark constitutes "teaching."
Most law firms are now at 3 days a week in the office. Traditionally, new lawyers lasted only a few years at their first firm.
Wow this is so shockingly surprising for a species that evolved in tribes that individuals would miss being on a team.
That sounds about right. The Wu Flu destroyed an awful lot of social fabric. We are mammals and we need company, fellow creatures whose moves and moods we need to read just as they read ours, with whom our unplanned interactions can produce serendipitous surplus. Sometimes we get in each other’s way or need solitude —but for most tasks a simplistic lockout strategy is suboptimal and has I think proven toxic.
I work from home in shorts.
It is really nice to wake up and walk down the stairs and start typing out the code that has been rolling around while I slept.
I do like to go in and see everyone every now and then though for meetings and parties.
I put on pants for that.
"We are having fun with each other. We all have friends here. We are a team. We are in the office partly to do work, and partly so we can all add value to each other. Professional value, emotional value, inspirational value, value when we are down to get picked up, value to have the thrill of teaching and being taught, and every other kind of value."
Gag me. IANAL, but if I were there is not enough money in the world to get me to work at that firm.
I'm on this journey myself right now. I'm 2 decades into a career. My first 10-15 years I enjoyed the benefits of office camaraderie....but also of bosses and experienced superiors literally showing me hands-on how to improve my work product. I built lifetime relationships that have served my career well across multiple companies.
Now I'm 2.5 years into working from home with very modest travel.I haven't forged any new in depth relationships in 2.5 years. And my "on the job" learning has gone way down.
I'm not saying work from home is dead, but I am saying that particularly folks younger in their careers NEED the in-person experience in a significant manner. This could be a week a month with a time-together-intense agenda, whatever.
My concern isn't work from home. My concern is without that experience and intensity, the future generation of workers are gonna SUCK.
So does a firm with in-office lawyers have higher billable hours than a firm of the same number, in a firm which works from home offices? Asking because the only way that would happen is if the in-office lawyers bill clients for lawyer-to-lawyer "having fun" and "teaching" and "being taught," each of which takes up time that the at-home lawyers likely use for work they charge clients to do.
I suspect the "kind of value" these in-office lawyers are seeking is higher billable hours. Yet the at-home lawyers can document more accurately their billable interactions with coworkers on legal issues, as online activity is readily tracked as to people involved and subject matter and who to charge for the work.
I wonder how the partners adapt to WFH. So many of them enjoy lording over others, taking public naps on their couches, showing off trophy wives and cars . . .
I also wonder how new lawyers get to be real lawyers without in-person mentoring.
I suppose many big firm lawyers never appear in court anymore.
I attend regional and National meetings for the human interaction. To meet people I know of, but dont know. Zoom fails at that.
"networking" was all the rage 20-30 years ago. Building a HUMAN network of people in order to enlarge or add circle(s) of people that you can partner with, on things small to large. I ag retail I have a large number of people I know, well enough, they will take or return my call.
I always spent time talking to people at our company, that worked at different locations. We shared experiences that might make us more efficient. I learned a person in the head office was always there at 6 am. So the next time I spoke to her on the phone I asked if I would be intruding on her time if I had a pressing matter early in the morning, but not abuse the contact, and of course I would return the privilege. So a long productive relationship was started.
I still say, an office will become the new perk. Those will be the new mover and shakers. Not the people that never come in.
I would think lawyer conversations across specialties would by a huge asset in law...but, IANAL
Enigma @7:18 is why we need a like button.
Spot on.
I would run, not walk away, from any leadership role in NYC or LA. There is a collapse happening, beyond my understanding
Good luck. People might enjoy get-togethers, but no one wants to commute in to work, every day. It's over.
I’m pretty introverted and disagree with your take on the introvert/extrovert bit here. I know my introversion, or fundamental shyness or whatever will keep me from reaching out and creating these personal interactions as much as I really do need them, particularly if I’m in an unfamiliar environment like a new workplace. I need the “accidental” encounters to make sure I actually connect with people at all.
At every in-person meeting I've been to in the past 6 months (IANAL), the overwhelming consensus has been how nice it's been to see people in person, vs. Zoom.
Still, the building I work in is not at full capacity, and there are plenty of WFH-only people. I think they are missing out on crucial opportunities, but many of them also face hour+ commutes. I'm not sure what I would pick.
And OMFG at that guy in shorts. Eye-bleach please. How can anyone take him seriously?
Now do retail stores. Read that there were 2500 US malls in eighties, down to 700, and maybe by end of decade 150. But also read post-pandemic foot traffic up higher than expected.
And boy were the airports crowded when I flew to a couple of delayed memorial services recently. One of which was streamed.
WFH was embraced in large part because companies already merely viewed you as a fungible billable unit. There was already no loyalty on the part of employers before the lockdowns, especially towards younger workers. The days of staying with a company for twenty years until you get your gold watch are gone.
What do you call a dead law firm?
A good start.
Law professor is a good job for introverts, because there isn't any training for that job after you leave law school. (You might learn things, e.g., by researching an area of law for an article or a syllabus, but there isn't any technical or practical knowledge that other people can teach you.) In contrast, there is a lot of technical and practical knowledge that young associates don't get in law school and need to acquire, and that is best imparted in person. If that makes introverts unhappy, it's just too bad. Maybe being a law firm associate is the wrong job for those people.
"isn't the opinion expressed in that article pretty close to the attitude expressed by the boss on that show:"
In "The Office" everyone buys into Michael's attitude by the end, because the branch miraculously remained profitable through the financial meltdown and everyone kept their jobs even after the parent company was sold. When he left, they literally sang a hymn to him:
https://youtu.be/8OTglgfKdMo
The Office youtube comedy clips are good. The show itself is hard to watch. Both Gervais and Carell were a disappointment there. Compare Ghost Town and Get Smart, both 2008.
When you are the guy who says things like that, you don't understand how it feels to those who don't say things like that.
Thank you for writing that statement. My company has been pushing "We are having fun with each other in the office" since the beginning of the year. It is such BS, because you would go into the office and nobody was there. Where a global company, and when some leaders would come into town, they would say that want to see you in the office, but then never had time to actually meet with you in the office or otherwise. Well except for maybe an afterwork group dinner, that nobody that lived in town want to do because they also had family.
I'm not opposed to being in the office. It is part of the agreement to be there. But it is the agreement to be in office for the pay that gets me in. Not fake assertions of fun and joy.
Watch 'Silicon Valley' or 'Office Space.'
That was my life on the tech hamster wheel...
Every office I've worked in has been a terrible working environment: People crowded together, talking all around you, phones ringing, slamming doors, not to mention long commutes and far-away parking. Yet if you weren't productive enough under those conditions, it was considered your own fault. (Of course, the top execs making decisions about the workplace set-up had their own quiet offices with plenty of personal space, assigned parking spots in covered garages, and could afford to live close by.) Working remotely can be lonely at times, but I get a heck of a lot more done.
Probably the best benefit coming out of this is the option of working from home (permanently or occasionally) being formalized. Prior to the pandemic, I worked places where working from home was prohibited - until it wasn't for some people with no explanation of why they were the exception. My niece recently got a job where working from home is permitted so many days per week. For a single Mom with a child, it is a godsend when the child is sick.
My law partner in our transactional practice is my wife. We have a lovely office in the Golden Triangle of Beverly Hills, the legendary 90210 zip code, and one of us goes in once a month to pick up the mail just before the invoices go out. If all our clients would pay us by ACH, we probably wouldn’t even do that. But that’s pretty much how things were before the vid. We have our firm meetings in bed ….if you get my drift.
The law firm required us to go to Las Vegas this last weekend with instructions to see a few sessions of the Battlebots tournament and shoot some craps. We did as we were told and conferenced with the bot builders and fellow dice shooters.
Life is good
- Krumhorn
Still, the building I work in is not at full capacity, and there are plenty of WFH-only people. I think they are missing out on crucial opportunities, but many of them also face hour+ commutes. I'm not sure what I would pick.
In Boston, they used the Covid shutdowns to eliminate one of the three in-bound lanes on the Tobin Bridge to make it busses only. Pre-Covid, that bridge handled 63,000 vehicles per day, so if the city were to go back to full-time in-person, the already-long commute essentially got 33% worse (even at the low levels of office staffing, it presently has taken me as much as 45 minutes to go the 3.5 miles of the Tobin). On top of that, the city eliminated one or two lanes on many of the major surface roads in Boston, to create bus-only and bike-only lanes, further increasing gridlock. Boston has plans for such development on still more of its roads - the current plan for State Street indicates that, by 2030, the city wants to increase mass transit use by a third, walkers by half, and bicyclers four-fold, while looking to decrease single-person car traffic by half.
None of this makes commuting to the city particularly attractive.
Practice area matters. In my line of work (employment immigration) we work in pairs - easy to do remotely. Being physically present might matter more in class action or other practice area. But at some point, hard copy has to be handled and submitted (for some practice areas). Thus, it tends to be assistants, or the copy center staff that need to be in the office.
OTOH - making your billable hour goal generally doesn't leave too much time for this 'fun' being referred to.
I enjoyed working a hybrid schedule of two days at the office and three days at home in my last two years of work. However, if I had not recently retired and had to choose between working at the office all five days of the week or working remotely all five days, I would have picked working at the office full time. I enjoyed the company of my work colleagues, and it was more efficient to get things done in the office, given the direct physical access to work files and office equipment.
I think that the big thing lost with WFH is synergy, at least for a law firm. Why use a firm, instead of a solo? One reason is that those lawyers with similar practices (e.g. patent attorneys like me) hanging around other patent attorneys tend to be a lot more current on changes in the law, etc. It’s also much easier to get feedback on your work. I learned my trade through a lot of feedback from other patent attorneys, much of it more constructive than supportive. Interestingly, I probably get more requests for this currently from one guy whose firm has gone completely WFH.
The other part of synergy in a more generalized firm is the relationship. Asked a friend, decades ago, why he was using one of the most expensive firms in town. His answer was that, whatever the legal question, he could call his lawyer, and the lawyer would be back with him shortly with the right answer. He didn’t do the research to bring himself up to speed in a subject he wasn’t an expert in, but instead, just called up (or popped into the office of) one of the experts in the firm. This friend saved a lot of money not having to pay for the research to bring his lawyer up to speed. While I los t a lot of the advantages of a patent firm my last five years in practice, I did have this - we had experts in almost anything imaginable, and I could get good answers for my clients in short order. We had Offices in six cities, in four states, so the firm put on periodic attorney retreats for the entire firm. And our IP practice group got together physically, and electronically, even more often. The clients are paying for those relationships between attorneys (I thought our fees were ridiculously high when I first went over to that firm), so the firm had to spend money to foster them. If I had a Gaming question, I knew maybe the top Gaming attorney in the country. And our C/R and TM attorneys had forgotten more than the ones I had known in previous practice. Sure, I had diddled in those IP areas, but until you work with IP attorneys who manage marks known in most households and the like, you don’t realize what you don’t know. I learned a lot just by being an intermediary between them and my clients.
That all said, I love the idea of being able to live pretty much wherever you want. I loved living and working in Summit County, CO, where I could ski in the morning, work afternoons, then flat track (ski) across the lake before dusk, and work evenings. Now, I love our little corner of NW MT, at least during the 6 months a year we are there (essentially between last snow of one year, and first snow of the next). That patent attorney friend I mentioned above is an hour or so away, on a lake in N ID, where they have Wed and Sun sailboat races, right by a ski area, and all sorts of wildlife in the yard (not always good - a mountain lion took a Great Dane a mile or so away earlier this month, and coyotes two doors down were hassling their neighbor’s dog). I tend to work intensely for a couple hours at a time. He is more the 15-30 minutes of hard work, separated by working outdoors on one of his many projects, for a similar length of time, type of guy. For both of us, our lifestyles are idyllic. It used to be that you had to chose between pursuing a good career in an urban shithole, or living in around where you grew up, or some other paradise you discovered (grew up around Summit County, CO, and discovered NWMT). Not so much anymore.
@Ted - bad offices are a business decision. I turned down a job with HP, because they put all of their attorneys in cubicles. The advantage of being a supervisor was that their cubicles were closer to the wall. I couldn’t work that way productively. I always had an office with a door while I was a patent attorney, and most of the time when I was in software development. Best office there was in the locked computer room, with a huge room to myself (at one point I had 4 terminals and 2 PCs lined up there, along with a large desk). Throughout this, I would work intensely for an hour or two, then come out, walk around, and talk to le for a bit, before going back into my office, shutting the door, and getting back to work.
Tech companies (like HP) have all sorts of justifications for their idiotic office setups, but they never seem to take into consideration that many of their more creative and innovative people don’t do well in an open or cubicle filled office. For me, I need privacy to concentrate, and I need good concentration to do a good job. Some people don’t, and I expect that they are the ones designing offices.
I have written it before and will write it again- if your job really can be done from your home, then it can be done from Bangalore or Mumbai at 1/4 or less the cost. This might not apply to lawyers so much given the regulation they put into the laws to prevent competition, but it will eventually.
@ALP - practice area matters a lot. I did mostly patent prep and prosecution. It was mostly a solo job, with long stretches concentrating on one patent application. It works really well in a home office. It works decently well in a private office. For me, working in a cubicle would be horrid. I take time to spool up, in order to concentrate, and I need to eliminate distractions. I found though that other IP work was much more transactional, and those doing it well could bounce between people, tasks, and conversations did much better at it than I did. There is some transactional work in patents, such as licensing. I didn’t enjoy it as much. When I was with a big electronics company, those with seniority tended to move towards transactional work, which left those less senior doing the patent prep and prosecution. Which was good for me - I became very efficient at it, and consistently was in the top 2-3 patent attorneys in a group of over 100, which turned out to be fairly good job protection, since patent application filings were much easier to quantify for upper management that the transactional work was.
@tommyesq: I lived in Boston for many years and dealt with public transportation across the Tobin when I moved to Chelsea. It was hell on skates. Sometimes my total commute was over an hour each way. And I worked in Cambridge.
Here in SF I've seen a definite uptick in foot traffic in the downtown/Financial District, but mainly on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. But these are mainly folks who are lower in the office pecking order - many senior partners and other C-suite people bugged out of the Bay Area with the lockdown and have told their firms they're not coming back to the office unless there's a dire need.
I switched jobs over the summer and have gone back into the legal world where the two managing partners and I are in at least three days a week. The entire firm meets in person on Wednesdays over lunch to discuss cases and other relative business. It's been fun and has helped me ramp up on client matters quickly.
I'm glad to be back in the office. I need a place to go every day, and the novelty of working from home in my sweats completely wore off by the middle of 2021.
“I have written it before and will write it again- if your job really can be done from your home, then it can be done from Bangalore or Mumbai at 1/4 or less the cost. This might not apply to lawyers so much given the regulation they put into the laws to prevent competition, but it will eventually.”
It is illegal to ship inventions off to Bangalore or Mumbai for them to write patent applications. You need a foreign filing license, which the USPTO won’t grant until the patent application has been filed, and then reviewed for national security issues. Except that companies like IBM have been flaunting this for years.
"I have written it before and will write it again- if your job really can be done from your home, then it can be done from Bangalore or Mumbai at 1/4 or less the cost."
This is an observation that people have been making for about three decades now. I can't tell you why it is not true, but I can assure you that it isn't. My job can be and is done from my home, which is not in India.
Extroverts bring in the clients. I speak as someone who is the staff person who has worked from home for decades.
Introversion is characterized by "me, too" time, not isolation.
Ah, the fairer sex. Ladies in dresses, in skirts, in pants, in shorts, are all appreciated.
I can't watch the TV show "The Office"...
Aww. I don't watch a lot of scripted TV, but I've thoroughly enjoyed this show. As someone who passes on a lot of popular pop art, I understand your view. Surprised it's just now come up.
<...but isn't the opinion expressed in that article pretty close to the attitude expressed by the boss on that show...
Yes, pretty much. The office is his family. But it's often acknowledged that he's lonely and this isn't the healthiest outlook.
My daughter-in-law has run a marketing business from home while raising her three kids and has done very well. One company she worked for had the CEO get "Woke" so she quit and had another job in a week.
I need the face to face experience and have missed it quite a bit. I seem to be in the minority. I don't want to be a fungible billing unit.
Jupiter, 3 decades ago, it wasn't possible to outsource a job that way- it wasn't even possible 15 years ago. It is today in a way it never has been before. A lot of people working from home are going to discover this in the next recession.
if your job really can be done from your home, then it can be done from Bangalore or Mumbai at 1/4 or less the cost.
This is famously also true for jobs done in factories. WFH has nothing to do with it.
So we’ll end up with introvert law firms, where all the lawyers work from home, and extrovertblaw forms, where all the lawyers go to the office, and we’ll see over time which is the more successful form of organization.
Is there anyone on this thread who is not a lawyer ?
I worked for a BIG LAW firm for about 34 years before I retired. During most of that time, personal contact with other lawyers was an important part of my practice. Some of that contact had nothing to do with what I was doing, but it kept me going.
I retired at 60 because I could, but I continued to practice p/t working from (a distant) home, with the same firm providing clerical support. When I had reasons to visit the home office, I was happy to see my old friends and colleagues. Eventually, I affiliated with a much smaller firm, and I liked visiting them when I had occasion to do so.
I don't think I would have had as rewarding a career experience if I hadn't had the personal contact, that was part of this contact with many other people doing what I was doing.
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