The Law Firm Disrupted: For Office Policies, Big Law Has Its Ear to the Market, Not to Trump
In a competitive arena for landing and retaining talent, it’s tough to put the flexibility genie fully back in the bottle.
By Dan Packel
Honestly, I thought the RTO question had been resolved about a year and a half ago, when we ran our The New Normal? series, which aimed to make sense of what the future of in-office work in the legal industry looked like. The question mark was there to indicate that there was some room for movement, but really, all the reporting converged on the conclusion that hybrid work was here to stay.
Underpinning this conclusion is the reality that law firms are constrained by market forces. In a competitive arena for landing and retaining talent, it’s tough to put the flexibility genie fully back in the bottle. Given the premium workers now place on the ability to work from home periodically, it would likely take some degree of collusion with peers for most firms to successfully impose a five-day a week mandate, and I like to think that every law firm managing partner knows enough about antitrust law to rule this out.
Obviously, certain law firms have been clamping down a little bit. Weil, Gotshal & Manges; Ropes & Gray; Davis, Polk & Wardwell; Vinson & Elkins and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Latham & Watkins have all moved towards a four-day expectation, whether it's firmwide or certain offices. And Sullivan & Cromwell is now signaling five. But all of these firms are in a position to offer market-topping salaries and bonuses to associates, along with a range of other perks that make the commute more palatable: “gym, laundry, cafe, free food,” as one Sullivan & Cromwell associate rattled off to my colleague Dan Roe.
Even these benefits likely won’t be enough to stop some attorneys to “vote with their feet,” as Washington D.C. recruiter Jeffrey Lowe said on LinkedIn recently.
Federal, state and local governments have a different relationship with the market, obviously. Their mission isn’t ultimately to return profits to their partners or shareholders, but theoretically to serve the public interest.
That was part of the justification when Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, in my home city, brought municipal workers back to the office Monday through Friday in 2024. One of the stated goals here was to increase the sense of safety in the heart of the city, by increasing the daytime population, while also inspiring private sector businesses to bring back their personnel too. (Comcast, the highest-ranked Fortune 500 company based in the city, hasn’t budged from a four-day mandate since her announcement, and Philadelphia’s largest law firms haven’t ramped up their expectations either.)
That’s why I wasn’t surprised when, after a number of our reporters asked about the impact of President Trump’s new order that federal workers be in the office five days a week, law firm leaders essentially shrugged. I suspect one of the unspoken justifications for the executive order is forced attrition. (This is of a piece with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, after all.)
Nearly five years after offices abruptly emptied out in March 2020, firms know what they need to do to attract and retain the talent necessary to serve their clients. In most cases, hybrid work helps them get there.
Read the full post at law.com
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