Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

  The Washington real estate market is hot, which makes office space hard to come by—and expensive—for local law firms. Yet at the same time, the pandemic has changed how lawyers use their office space. More lawyers intend to work from home more frequently, and the office has become a place more for collaboration and client meetings than a place you sit for 12 hours a day. Against this backdrop, two local D.C. firms chose to move house in 2021. Even before the pandemic, midsize financial services firm Gilbert had already embraced a concept known as hoteling, or hot-desking. Offices and work areas are available to all staff, but they are not assigned. If lawyers and staff decide they want to come into the office, they can book a space on an app. The impetus for the idea was the upcoming renewal of Gilbert's lease in a traditional downtown D.C. offices 10 minutes' walk from the White House, their near neighbors the likes of Covington & Burling, White & Case and Jenner & Block. There was a widespread feeling among the team that it was an opportunity to rethink office life, and in 2018, the lawyers, staff and management came together to discuss what they wanted the future of life and work at the firm to look like. The result was a hybrid model of work from home well before anyone knew what the coronavirus was. When lockdowns began in March 2020, Gilbert was already well prepared. "We had done a lot of training for people on how to work remotely effectively. We had electronic systems in place and already tested," said longtime Gilbert partner Craig Litherland. Work on the new offices was completed in May 2020, while everyone was on lockdown at home. And in June this year, Gilbert moved into the new offices in Southwestern D.C. in the thriving and trendy Eastern Market neighborhood. Six months after moving in, Litherland said the move has been a great success for Gilbert. "We've all been pleasantly surprised that our design has worked as well as it has," Litherland said. The new offices feature multiple booths and workstations scattered throughout the office, as well as multiple den areas to foster informal collaboration. Tech features include cloud-managed Wi-Fi 6-enabled access points and multiple desk configurations with ergonomic desks for standing and sitting. Next for Gilbert is tweaking their operations based on their understanding of how colleagues interact in the new environment. "We're thinking about how we do things in a different working mode, like bringing on new staff and lawyers, and keeping the information flowing when people don't see each other every day," said Litherland. Storied Beltway Am Law 100 firm Wiley Rein was another locally headquartered firm to move house in 2021. Wiley is known to be presently in the process of moving into its new offices at 2050 M St., Northwest, after spending almost 40 years on K Street, just two blocks from the White House. Wiley's new offices are a few blocks further northwest, in the same building as CBS News and next door to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. While the firm is yet to provide any details on its new digs, they are understood to be larger, more open plan and designed to grow with the firm. Like Gilbert, Wiley is understood to have already been looking for new offices before the pandemic.