Frost Brown Todd. Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

Frost Brown Todd has consolidated two Dallas offices into one new space, a relocation impacted by the coronavirus pandemic even though it was in the works long before stay-home orders led to lawyers and staff working remotely.

The firm began moving into the new location in the Uptown area May 27, but Monday will mark the start of a regular schedule that will ensure that no more than 50% of the lawyers and staff are in the office at once, said Dan Novakov, the managing partner there.

After nearly three months of working remotely, Novakov said the firm's 13 offices are slowly reopening, although some states are farther along in the process. On June 3, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an order that allows businesses to operate at 50% capacity.

Frost Brown ended up with two offices in Dallas because of a lateral hire group.

The firm launched in Dallas in 2015, moving into space in The Crescent that it subleased from Weil, Gotshal & Manges. It picked up a second Dallas office in February 2019 when five litigators from Rose Walker joined Frost Brown.

Novakov said there wasn't enough room in the firm's office for all of the lawyers, so the trial lawyers stayed in the former Rose Walker office since that firm was closing.

In June 2019, Frost Brown started looking for new office space in Dallas, Novakov said, since both leases were ending around the end of May this year. The lawyers wanted to stay in the Uptown area of Dallas, and they located space large enough to accommodate all 30 lawyers and 10 staff in Rosewood Court.

It was important for collaborative reasons to consolidate into one office, Novakov said.

"So much more synergy occurs when you've got everybody under one roof," he said.

While social distancing and safety concerns limit the current capacity of the Texas office,  Novakov said those restrictions did not lead to any last-minute changes in the configuration of the new space.

While the layout is "more of an open concept" than the office at The Crescent, he said, the way the space is configured allows for social distancing. The only significant accommodation was adding a plastic glass barrier at the front desk, he said.

Novakov said that while lawyers and staff will start to return to the office regularly beginning on Monday, that only applies to people who are comfortable doing so.

"There are certain people that have risk factors in addition to just the virus, so we are really trying to be careful there. We haven't had a positive [COVID-19] case, and we don't want one," he said.

He said the exercise in working remotely shows that the firm can work from outside the offices. But, he adds, he personally missed the in-person collaboration.

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