This lesson continues the mini-series on leadership challenges in the post-pandemic era, focusing on working from home (WFH). Previously, we discussed how hybrid WFH is here to stay, and concluded that if done right, it can benefit individual attorneys, firms and clients. Having looked at attorneys, now we look at clients.

One of the reasons some law firms struggle with return-to-work is that they don’t really know why they want it. There is a sense that the pandemic is over (President Biden has said it is) and we have these expensively appointed offices, so why don’t the attorneys just come back in, and we’ll go back to how it was before.

But those firms are hankering for a return to a normal that doesn’t exist anymore. So why are law firms so anxious to get people back in the office? Maybe it’s something steeped in the psyche of lawyers about respecting precedent and doing things the way we’ve always done them and not acknowledging the sea change, similar to why many firms lost talent during the talent wars.  

One key tenet of Lean Adviser is don’t just look down and in, remember to look up and out. The law is a service industry, so don’t just look within the firm, look at what’s in the clients’ interests. Viewed through this prism, the question of hybrid work from home suddenly becomes a lot clearer.

If you apply the principles of lean to WFH, what do you get? You let the assignment decide where the work should be done. This idea of ‘Project-led WFH’ allows the task at hand to dictate where the lawyers work, how they interact with each other and the client. This approach puts the work in service of the assignment, and lets the task at hand decide where — and even when — makes most sense.

Project-led WFH meets all the attributes of lean, which clients tell us are the big differentiator. It’s efficient, effective, structured and client-driven. It also addresses a key concern of the professional indemnity community. Insurers have noted an uptick in claims associated with WFH, where mentoring, monitoring and supervision are identified as factors. But the answer isn’t bringing people into the office on three random days a week, regardless of the task at hand.

If you want to mitigate risk around supervision, go to Project-led WFH. If it’s a deep dive into documents or drafting, then work from home. If it’s in context appreciation, project planning, risk analysis, brainstorming or problem solving, then meet in the office. If it’s investigation, then go to the site, and if it’s client collaboration, then meet with the client, which, depending on the client’s perspective and their own return-to-office policy, could either be visiting the client at their office like in the “good old” days or from each other’s living rooms. 

As we continue this discussion, we’ll look more closely at reliability, operational safety and loss prevention.