Many of the lessons currently being learned from remote work are bound to remain relevant even after we're free to return to our offices. Feeling isolated yourself? Email me here. Want this dispatch in your inbox every Thursday? Sign up here.

Our Remote Future

Are you tired of Zoom meetings yet? Hopefully not. Because they're not going anywhere. And that's not a function of this quarantine lasting forever. I'm not going to hazard a guess on how long this peculiar moment we're in is going to go on. But the longer the status quo continues and members of the knowledge economy make their livings at home, the technologies we're currently relying on will become more and more ingrained.

It's an idea gaining momentum across professional services. Bain & Company's Asia-Pacific regional partner, Satish Shankar, told Bloomberg this week that he anticipates companies eying cuts to expensive travel and real estate budgets, and instead prioritizing home office technology, once the virus dissipates. "We are poised for a dramatic wanton increase of the digitalization of our economies," he said.

Okay, so less travel to meet clients, for starters. But what of law firms in particular, run by lawyers who are especially hidebound about this sort of thing? Here too, change is going to be inevitable, driven in part by the generational transformation currently in progress. Remember, before we were all forced to work remotely, more and more firms were rolling out policies allowing a day or two a week out of the home office or at the coffee shop down the street, owing in part to millennials' heightened expectations for work-life balance. (As someone just on the Gen-X side of the divide, I'll call them justified.)

All this is going to affect what law offices look like in the next decade. A small footprint seems inevitable. Earlier this week, I spoke to the new U.S. managing partners at DLA Piper, which has frozen capital expenditures on building out offices. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that when the firm returns to the subject, the plans for its spaces will look quite different than they did initially.

Altman Weil's Eric Seeger has an interesting perspective on this. When the consultancy's lease in suburban Philadelphia was up for renewal a number of years ago, leaders made the decision to switch to an all-remote model. He told me that in almost every survey that's been conducted, remote workers have been shown to get as much done or more than they would if they were in the office.

"Once people get adjusted to working from home, not having to commute into the office and recapturing their time, their overall productivity tends to go up," he said. Speaking from personal experience, I suspect these gains are also dependent on having a school or daycare for children to attend.

Under conventional circumstances, Seeger also pointed to reduced stress and better health as positives, as well as organizations reporting improved recruitment, loyalty and retention.

On the other side of the ledger are increased separation and isolation (and not just when all forms of physical interaction are curtailed), as well as heightened prospects for confusion and misunderstanding. That puts the onus on leaders within the firm. "Managing a virtual workplace requires more management, not less," Seeger said.

And the type of communication required is different, too. What works in person might not work over the phone, let alone in a Zoom meeting with a wide array of folks. Seeger even advises that firms offer training in how to connect with audiences and come across persuasively via video. Seems like a sound investment. COVID-19 will go away at some point. There will be a vaccine. But remote work, in some format, will remain a part of our lives.

That is, unless you work at the firm referenced in this tweet: Just heard of the first law firm going back to mandatory in-office work part time starting Monday for attorneys, the following Monday for staff, then full time 100% attendance and normal business as usual by May 4.

Good luck to them.

In The News

➤➤ I don't know if you all read Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter, but I learn something new every day from the one-time Goldman Sachs investment banker, Wachtell M&A associate and Third Circuit clerk. He's been writing a bit about where work gets done in the I-banking world. There's an exception to my earlier talk about the knowledge economy. Apparently the folks who oversee trading at JPMorgan are insistent that work needs to get done at the office. Perhaps that accounted for the excellent first quarter over there. But he's hoping that's not the final accounting of it all:

I am rooting for some other banks to announce even better quarters in their trading businesses, and to add "oh by the way we sent everyone home early on and kept them home, they made us all this money safely." It will be a little unsettling if the takeaway from this crisis is "we risked our employees' health to make some extra money, and it worked great."

➤➤ I spoke with Dan Rodriguez, the former Northwestern University Law School dean, for an upcoming story looking at regulatory barriers to lawyers responding to the current crisis. He addresses the issue here, in the blog of the Harvard Law Review, drawing a useful parallel between the legal industry and the healthcare industry. In brief, "our balkanized system of professional regulation makes it much more difficult to match lawyer and physician demand with supply.

➤➤ And finally, we've talked about virtual firms here in the past. My colleague Frank Ready surveyed how some of these shops may have a built-in advantage for this particular point in time. But, with the rest of the industry potentially on the cusp of change, as we discussed earlier, can they hold on to the upper hand when this is all over?

Wash your hands, keep your distance, try your best to stay sane, and you'll hear from me again next Thursday. Thanks again for reading, and please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]. Sign up here to receive The Law Firm Disrupted as a weekly email.