No room for egos in law office of the future

 Firms may be forced to abandon strict hierarchal office traditions

By Brandon Gee
The Daily Record Newswire

 BOSTON — With the planned relocation of Goodwin Procter, one of Boston’s oldest and most storied law firms will join several of its younger counterparts in the Seaport neighborhood’s so-called Innovation District, continuing the exodus of attorneys from the Financial District.

When Goodwin moves into its new offices in the 17-story tower currently under construction at Fan Pier (slated to happen in the summer of 2016), expect to see many of the same features that have come to characterize the city’s most modern law offices: a smaller footprint overall; a far smaller library; more conference rooms, lounges and other spaces for collaboration; lawyer offices located (gasp!) in the interior of a floor without an exterior window; and glass — lots and lots of glass.

Those are just some of the increasingly more common features of newer law offices. The office of the future, however, could bring even more dramatic changes as pressure mounts on firms to cut costs and accommodate the working habits of younger attorneys. Such drivers may soon force the law to follow the lead of other professions and ditch strict hierarchal office traditions.

Stubbornness

For now, though, many such traditions persist.

Alexander A. Randall, a Goodwin Procter partner who handles the firm’s office leasing and construction activities, says that while Goodwin plans to put first-year associates in interior offices, other offices in the new digs will retain the same model and size as in the current space.

“It’s remarkably un-different from a traditional law firm. We’re sticking with a fairly traditional perimeter office layout with larger offices for partners and smaller ones for non-partners and senior administrators,” Randall says. “What we’re trying to do in our space that we weren’t able to do in our old space is use our interior space much more efficiently.”

Glass walls will allow more natural light to be enjoyed throughout office floors and also foster collaboration.

“You’re much more likely to interact with someone if you can see them,” Randall says. “Our current space is very closed in. You wouldn’t know if someone was in the office unless you went to look.”

Overall, Goodwin is reducing its footprint from about 455,000 square feet in Exchange Place (53 State St.) to about 345,000 square feet in the new building. That drastic increase in efficiency could be further bolstered by lower rent. Randall won’t reveal that cost, but according to figures for the second quarter from commercial real estate firm Cassidy Turley, the average rent per square foot in the Seaport District ($38.46) is 17 percent lower than the average rent per square foot in the Financial District ($46.37).

In Fish & Richardson’s Seaport offices, light fixtures feature holograms and sliding glass walls can transform intimate meeting rooms into more expansive seating areas with expansive views of Boston Harbor. Managing partner Timothy A. French also achieved cost savings for the firm by jumping the Fort Point Channel in 2010 — but not without a fight.

For his colleagues most offended about the idea of leaving their 225 Franklin St. address, French had to arrange a field trip to the firm’s new Marina Park Drive offices to prove they wouldn’t be that far away.

A decision to significantly reduce office sizes also prompted grumbles, and some of the firm’s most displeased lawyers rebelled against their all-glass walls by shoving bookcases against them. The offices are soundproof, though, which attorneys in offices closest to the cafeteria ping-pong table surely appreciate.

But status symbols endure. The offices, while smaller, still come in two different sizes for partners and associates — and French’s is in the corner.

Flexibility

“I would love to see more firms go to one-size offices; it provides for maximum flexibility,” says Jeanne M. Nutt, managing director of Gensler in Boston, an integrated architecture, design, planning and consulting firm with many law firm clients.

Recognizing the rapid and disruptive innovation impacting the legal industry, Gensler advises firms to create floor plans flexible enough to allow for fast and easy changes, a recommendation that doesn’t lend itself to multiple office sizes and a refusal to move lawyers away from the perimeter.

But even if they haven’t forced their existing attorneys to move inwards, many firms are preparing to put future lawyers there before they develop contrary expectations. With firms, including Fish & Richardson, increasingly going paperless and transferring support staff to centralized business centers in cheaper real estate markets, the migration of lawyers to the interior areas formerly home to back-office administrators and files is probably inevitable anyway.

“Boston is, as expected, a little more traditional,” Nutt says. “Most firms aren’t doing it yet, but recognizing they will have to. They are building that now, so the change in the future is not a huge redo, but a minor intervention.”

The increased focus on collaboration should ease the transition, according to Nutt. While having lawyers plug away alone in their offices may maximize billable time, firms under pressure from clients are striving for efficiency. That calls for the sharing of information and consultations with expert colleagues.

New law offices encourage that by making meeting spaces and gathering spots plentiful. Nutt says lawyers should embrace those spaces for all types of meetings and let go of the desire for a grand personal suite for impressing and entertaining clients and colleagues.

“Once you have four or more people, you should be moving out of the office anyway, into collaborative space,” she says. “You don’t need to have six-person meetings in your office.”

At many firms, one such collaborative space has become the law library, which, unlike in years past, rarely serves as a massive repository for physical books.

“We don’t need two-story libraries because everyone is doing research online,” says Lynn A. Kappelman, chair of the labor and employment department at Seyfarth Shaw in Boston.

In fact, Goodwin Procter’s new library will be about a third of the total size of its current libraries. The new library primarily will be “a place for librarians to work, not books to live,” Randall says.

Meanwhile, the library at Fish & Richardson consists of just three shelves in a space less than the size of an office. The firm’s previous library took up an amount of space equal to five or six offices, French says.

“We haven’t seen the library go away completely. What we are seeing is it is being incorporated into a collaborative area,” Nutt says. “The space is almost like a ‘Starbucks’ approach. It’s a place you can work on your laptop and consult a reference librarian if you need to. It’s multi-function space.”

What’s next?

Nutt and Kappelman agree that the next wave of law office changes will be driven by technology and employee mobility.

“What’s happening, and what’s driving change, is business is becoming much more global, the workforce is much more global, and the technology allows people to work from anywhere and service clients from everywhere,” Kappelman says. “People aren’t sitting at their desks anymore. And nobody really cares whether people are sitting at their desks.”

Nutt predicts firms will transition to more point-to-point videoconferencing, so that participants can easily participate in meetings from their office — or anywhere else on a laptop — without having to compete with colleagues for space in technology-enabled conference rooms.

Fish & Richardson is even in the process of building its own studio so that lawyers don’t have to go off-site to give a media interview or to produce videos for marketing or training purposes

“Attorneys’ time is money,” says the firm’s chief marketing officer, Kelly Kiernan Largey. “So if we can have people around here, it’s a win for us.”

At the same time, most firms are becoming more flexible about where their lawyers work. That’s led many to consider the concept of “hotelling” — a practice in which no one has a permanent assigned office, but reserves space in the firm as needed. The idea has been slow to catch on, even though firms know how often many of their offices sit empty and that many other industries have employed it.

“It’s a real problem. We spent a lot of time trying to solve that knot,” Randall says, noting that a study showed his firm’s offices were being used only 40 to 60 percent of the time.

“That seems like an awful big waste of space, especially with telecommuting and lawyers working across different geographies. It’s a tough thing to do because people aren’t ready for that wholesale show-up-one-day-and-be-told-which-office-to-go-to,” he says.

As an interim step, Randall says, lawyers who split their time between two cities will be given a permanent office in only one.

Seyfarth moved into its Boston office in 2001 before the firm started making some of its most drastic changes to its other offices. But Kappelman says trends such as smaller offices will come to Boston, as they have to the firm’s newer sites in cities such as Atlanta. In Houston, Seyfarth is one of the first major firms to employ a hotelling-with-team-conference-room model, an arrangement that allows the office to host 35 percent more people, Kappelman reports.

“My opinion is, at some point, it’s just going to make sense,” Nutt says of hotelling. “That one … is tough because there has to be some sort of a tipping point for them to see it will make sense.”

Nutt sees the tipping point coming in about five years. In the meantime, Gensler is pushing the concept of “touchdown” spaces for traveling lawyers working at an office other than the one at which they are based. Such spaces were featured in Gensler’s “ReDesign Law” exhibit at the Association of Legal Administrators annual conference earlier this year in Toronto.

Kappelman says Seyfarth supports that concept with technology that allows phone calls to be routed to wherever their lawyers are.

“You would have no idea that I wasn’t on Seaport Lane when I pick up the phone in San Francisco,” Kappelman says, noting that some of Seyfarth’s lawyers don’t live and work in the city in which they officially have an office.

“Part of this ‘law firm of the future’ involves innovative staffing, allowing people to work on the schedule they can work where they can work. I find that collaborating with people on their schedule is just a wonderful way to do business,” she says. “You end up not losing some of the most talented people because they want to have kids, or their spouse needs to move for an opportunity.”