The news that Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer has directed partners, associates and trainees in London and Manchester to come into the office at least three days a week will have piqued interest around the market recently.
The move to increase office time from the 50% requirement the firm set out last year won’t have come as a surprise to many law firm leaders. They have been grappling with the thorny issue of how best to give staff the flexibility on offer pretty much everywhere else in the market while simultaneously avoiding ennui prompted by looking around at an empty office each day.
The hybrid working question is still pervasive, even after much policy making.
Looking through this issue of Legal Business, the hybrid working question is still pervasive, even after much policy making, tweaking and going back to the drawing board by management.
In our feature ‘Face value – mentoring in the hybrid work era’, Slaughter and May M&A partner Sally Wokes (pictured) is among the mentors to lament the detrimental impact enforced changes to working practices in the pandemic are having on the training of younger lawyers. ‘When we see how our junior lawyers operate now, you can tell they’ve been trained during the pandemic. They’ve missed out on the day-to-day, hearing the titbits of conversations, the lift discussions, the conversations on the way to and from meetings.’
Lauren Honeyben, mentee and Freshfields insurance M&A partner, is also alive to the challenges: ‘As an associate, you can’t learn the pitch or gravitas parts of the job by yourself. You need the opportunities to go to meetings regularly and get airtime with clients. It’s one of the things our associates have had less opportunity to do during the pandemic. That experience of being in a big set-piece meeting is something you can’t really replicate online.’
Similarly, in our feature Our Little Book, the challenges are no less real for Keystone Law, even though it was one of the trailblazers of remote working long before coronavirus struck.
Keystone’s reputation as a ‘virtual law firm’ is something of a double-edged sword. On one hand, having fewer overheads in the form of a smaller office space than more traditional counterparts is undoubtedly a boon. On the other, how do your junior lawyers learn their trade when they can’t be in the same room as the experienced generation?
Financially, the alternative model does not exactly lend itself to partners investing in the development of junior lawyers either – there needs almost to be a sense of altruism when it comes to bringing on the younger generation.
The debate over how much value can truly be imparted through virtual meetings has been raging for more than two years now and those who take the line that in-person meetings are immeasurably more valuable probably have right on their side.
Anyone who has been into the Square Mile on a Friday recently and marvelled at how quiet it is will have seen the reality first-hand – the balance between home and office working has not been fixed. It is a work in progress that must evolve via a process of trial and error. Whatever strategy law firm management decides, one thing seems certain – people will still be scratching their heads over the hybrid working problem this time next year.