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Midsize firms know it best—bigger isn't always better. And that goes for office space too.

Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt, a midsize firm in the Pacific Northwest, recently cut its leased space in Portland from five floors to four. The firm isn't shrinking its attorney head count or employee count, chief operating officer Denise Gaskin made clear. It's just using those four floors more efficiently.

“There was some concern internally, and externally with our clients,” she said. “We didn't want to send a message that we were retreating.”

The firm has cut down on the amount of space dedicated to holding hard-copy files, Gaskin said, using the opportunity to accelerate its move to paperless systems.

That's on top of updates the firm already made, six years ago, when it moved into that Portland location, which featured smaller offices with glass walls. The firm's library space has gone from half a floor to hallway space.

The most recent change came with some one-time costs to make the smaller space workable, but in terms of real estate expenses, Schwabe's rent spend is now 20 percent less in Portland.

Griesing Law, a small firm in Philadelphia, also recently shrunk its office space.

“When we started as a small group and as a woman-driven group we needed to have an appearance that gave people confidence in us, and that was particularly important, we found, for large institutional-type clients,” said the firm's founder and managing member Francine Friedman Griesing, explaining the firm's thought process behind selecting its previous, much larger office space when it first started with three attorneys about nine years ago.

Clients “really wanted to come into an office and feel secure like they did when they went to a megafirm and we wanted to convey that,” Griesing said. But now Griesing Law is an established firm with nine lawyers, four professional staff and a nationwide presence, so the need to try to impress or reassure clients with grandiose aesthetics has dissipated.

“I think if they walk into offices and there's this big expanse with expensive things they are thinking, 'Wait a minute, is this why I'm paying over $1,000 an hour for this person and do I want to pay for that?'” Griesing said.

Griesing Law went from about 9,000 square feet to about 5,000 square feet, said Jessica Mazzeo, Griesing Law's co-founder and chief operating officer. So the cost savings have been “considerable,” she said.

Likewise, Miami-based Lydecker Diaz, was driven to remodel space by clients' rate awareness when the 74-lawyer firm took over some of Greenberg Traurig's Miami space in 2010. Richard Lydecker, the firm's majority shareholder, came away thinking, “No wonder their rates were so high.” The office had “ridiculously large conference rooms.”

“But that's not my market. We're getting the mid-level businesses that care about what their legal rates look like,” he said. So Lydecker Diaz “stripped the place down” and created 1.5 times more individual offices than Greenberg. Conference rooms shrunk, and meetings have never run out of room.

But the tricky thing about real estate for midsize firms is accounting for future growth, said Andy Heinz, a partner at New York firm Desmarais.

His firm was founded in 2010 with five lawyers, all located on one floor in the Helmsley Building at 230 Park Ave in New York. Desmarais now has 57 lawyers, two floors, and just signed a lease for a third floor. The firm aims to provide each lawyer with their own office, but it's outfitting new offices with multiple computer hookups and phone hookups, so associates are able to share offices if the firm's hiring begins to outpace its physical space growth.

“Right now we're running out of space on the first two floors and waiting for the third one,” he said “Hopefully we'll start running out of space on the third floor someday.”

Gaskin, of Schwabe, agreed. “It's a hard thing to think about… projecting 10 years into the future to think how many lawyers will we have, how many staff will we have,” she said.

But as head counts grow, so is the number of firms allowing lawyers to work remotely, and the number of lawyers taking advantage of that.

Lydecker said when his firm took over Greenberg Traurig's space, “I just remember thinking that's not the future because everybody is working remotely,” he said. “Now I'm looking at the place and saying we made it too big.”

At Schwabe, some attorneys have chosen to share offices because they work remotely often. That made it easier for the firm to reduce its square footage in Portland by 20 percent.

“The individual office just isn't as important, the size and prestige. That's history. That isn't what's important today,” Gaskin said.

Mitchell Burnstein, managing director of South Florida's Weiss Serota Helfman Cole & Bierman, said a number of lawyers at the 68-attorney firm work remotely often, and therefore share office space. He borrowed the old navy term “hotbunking” to explain office use. On carriers and submarines, sailors working different shifts shared one bunk, which might still be warm when the next occupant hit the sack.

“It's not happening a lot, but it's going to happen more where we ask attorneys to hotbunk,” he said. Logging hours from a traditional office setting is “a bygone, obsolete notion,” he said.

But the firm wants to make sure remote operations don't hurt the law firm's culture, he noted, as well as the ability for young lawyers to seek mentorship.

“As a midsize firm we are very conscious of our atmosphere in promoting camaraderie. We want to make sure they're still connected through client events, court hearings” and so forth.

Cathy Wilson, Susan DeSantis and Zack Needles contributed to this report.