The COVID-19 pandemic might be officially “over,” but many of the practices that arose from the pandemic will be here to stay. That leads to an issue that law firms will struggle with —leadership in the post pandemic era. This lesson begins a series addressing that issue and how lean law principles can help. We start with the most pressing of those issues — working from home (WFH).

This WFH topic literally didn’t exist before the pandemic, now it’s front and center. Sure, there were attorneys who worked from the road and off-hours but that’s not the same as the complex and integrated systems and procedures that had to be set up for full-time remote working by the entire firm (including paralegals, assistants and other support staff such as IT). The worst of the pandemic seems to have receded, but this issue remains. The WFH toothpaste is out of the tube, and it won’t go back in.

Many law firms are still so challenged by WFH, that their policy is not to have a policy. Instead, they have guidelines. These tend to be a version of: “we’d like you to come into the office, we’re not saying you’d have to, but it’d be great if you did, at least a few days a week.”

So much for the law firm standpoint. As we often discuss in Lean Adviser, the attorney-client experience is key. So let’s look at WFH from the standpoints of attorneys and clients. This week our focus is attorneys.

An attorney in New York might take the subway and then walk a few blocks, while another in Austin might drive to the office and park outside. In the pandemic, one experience was a greater health risk than the other.

That health card may now be less valid, but a bigger issue remains: For many attorneys, working from home works. A WFH attorney can get up at 7 am, grab a coffee and a banana and do 3 hours of uninterrupted work before 10:30. A commuting attorney will often achieve very little by 10:30 (and that is assuming there are no unexpected obstacles in the attorney getting to the office, such as cancelled or delayed trains, traffic jams, long lines at Starbucks for that morning coffee, car trouble, etc.). (Certainly there could be a cost analysis done of the wear and tear on cars for those driving to work vs. working from home and not using the car.) As we’ve all learned, this disparity continues all day, and into the evening.

Where this is headed and where it will stay is hybrid working. As we’ve discussed, the current generation sees things differently and have different values and priorities than previous generations. For them in particular, this is irreversible. Many law firm leaders are coming to terms with this as a durable reality, which is absolutely the right reaction.

As ever, Lean Adviser has some insights on this issue. Remember, one of our fundamentals is just not the work you do, it’s how you do the work. Is it planned, structured, organized, goal-oriented and efficient? If applied thoughtfully, hybrid WFH aligns neatly with those attributes. Done right, hybrid WFH can benefit attorneys, firms and clients, the last of which is the topic of the next lesson.