In the future, we were told, there will be no law offices. Instead, lawyers and staff will work happily from their own basements and spare bedrooms. Technology will make this possible; the pandemic will make it necessary; economics will make it desirable.
Having signed a multi-year commitment to lease new office space, then under construction, just months before the pandemic began, such sentiments were not music to our ears.
Were we now stuck with yesterday’s office, which we could not fill? Would we endanger our people if we tried to fill it? Should we give up, abandon our commitment to our new landlord and instruct our contractors to down tools? Or could we work with the space to which we had just committed ourselves, to make it safer and more comfortable for our people? What to do?
Fortunately, the confines of our new physical space were not yet set in stone. There was still a chance to remake our plans for an office in the age of COVID.
And so we set to work.
We started with a number of big advantages. Our space was not built out, and so the plans could be tweaked. We had a first-rate office designer on board. And we had sliding glass doors, which opened to the outside.
With technical help from our designer and the engineers she brought onto our project, we made a few changes to our plans:
Give staff more room
Before the pandemic, we had already decided that our staff members’ “right to light” outweighed the tradition of placing lawyers’ offices against the windows, and so we designated a large contiguous staff zone next to the south windows. It was easy to reconfigure the desks going into that space to ensure that each seat was at least six feet away from each other seat.
Give lawyers less room
The days of corner offices the size of small apartments, the better to awe those clients fortunate or important enough to be permitted entry into the great professional’s inner sanctum, are behind us. COVID provided another reason to reserve individual lawyer’s offices for workspace, and to move all client meetings into larger and better-ventilated boardrooms. This also reduced the collective footprint of the lawyers’ offices, freeing it up for more productive use.
Give everyone more air
Our designer strategically repositioned large air vents more or less over each desk (or perhaps it was the desks that she repositioned under the air vents) and in all the boardrooms, to ensure the supply of fresh air. We were also fortunate to have committed to office space with large exterior glass sliding doors that, when open, allow a great deal of natural ventilation. We removed all the impediments to opening these doors from our design.
Block the flow of air
We reworked the design of our new reception desk to add a large glass partition between our receptionist and the client reception area. Each other staff desk has a similar partition.
The net result of these design tweaks was not a COVID-proof office: there is no such thing. However, if thoughtful design can make an office more resistant to transmission of the virus, then lawyers, staff, and clients are all more likely to feel comfortable in that office, and to be a great deal more enthusiastic in entering it rather than remaining in their basements and spare bedrooms.
This turned out to be our experience. We kept our commitment to our landlord, and occupied and filled our new space, more or less on schedule. We are not marooned in our respective basements and spare bedrooms, but instead have a reasonably safe workspace in which we can interact directly with our colleagues. We remain there, operating at full capacity, to this day.
We are not engineers or interior designers, and this article is not a treatise on how to design a modern office. It is instead one story of how thoughtful workspace design made a difference in the operation of a modern law firm.
As one of America’s greatest 20th century philosophers1 told us, “the future ain’t what it used to be.”
1 Yogi Berra, of course, though the line did not originate with him.