How we Built the Law Firm Office of the Future (And Saved a Ton of Money) - Part 1
By: Pamela V. Rothenberg, Esq.
We moved our firm’s
Washington, DC office just short of a year ago and, in doing so, we accomplished
something extraordinary. We designed and
built a forward-looking law firm office that empowers us to work together more
effectively, efficiently and collaboratively, and positions our professionals
to drive greater value to our clients.
And, if that were not enough, we saved our firm millions of dollars in
prospective occupancy costs as a result.
How did we achieve this result?
Our office came together as
an integrated and non-hierarchical team, with senior and junior lawyers
tirelessly working side by side with non-lawyer professional and administrative
staff. As someone fueled by innovation
and who frequently serves as a catalyst for change within my organization, I boldly
challenged this team to design and build the “law firm office of the future.” To their credit, my colleagues accepted this challenge
with open minds and courageous hearts.
Toiling for months over exactly what that concept meant, our diverse and
office-representative “space committee” questioned virtually all of our
previously unchallenged assumptions about the use of real estate by our law
firm. We speculated about what the
practice of law would be like in a decade and guided ourselves by the
transformational changes in the legal industry that we acknowledged to be
already underway. We pushed ourselves to
consider future possibilities that were often discomforting and sometimes
outright frightening. Frequently
reminding ourselves that we needed to seek guidance from our own clients’ more
effective use of real estate, we studied their aesthetic, and their efficient
and typically more modestly sized office space.
We strove to emulate how our clients minimize occupancy expenses and
maximize efficiencies and productivity. Our space committee did not accomplish this outcome alone. We worked very closely with our pioneering architect, Steve Polo and his team at OPX, who led (and sometimes dragged) us through this unique visioning process, using proprietary software and design approaches focused on our specific needs and customized to maximize the services we offer. His focus on the creation of an integrated operating environment truly brought us to new vistas. Our top flight brokerage professionals, Scott Hoffman and Audrey Cramer at Cushman, participated often in our creative sessions, adding real time guidance about market conditions and dynamics. Our general contractor, Linda Rabbitt at Rand Construction, worked step by step with members of our space committee to make sure that the design concepts we developed could actually be constructed into a reality. Our firm’s facilities manager, Kyle Godat, was absolutely indispensible to our success. He functioned like a magician – using his “higher powers” to keep us functioning as an aligned and integrated group and to prevent us from deviating from our chosen path of innovative change (no small task for a bunch of lawyers who are harder to herd than any animal on planet earth). He also seamlessly handled the unanticipated issues that invariably rise during a major office design/build project.
Another key contributing factor to this significant accomplishment was that every single person in our office and many of our professionals from other firm offices made material contributions to this visioning effort. We deliberately utilized internal “crowd sourcing” tactics that required broad based participation and we achieved extraordinary engagement from our colleagues with these processes. For example, for one office-wide survey that we conducted to identify key factors to be considered in a new office design, we achieved a ninety-eight percent participation rate.
Our resulting vision of the “law firm office of the future” turned the legacy space we had inhabited for the previous ten years on its head. We discovered and integrated operating efficiencies into our new office that we had never previously considered to be possible. Our innovative (for a law firm), light-filled space empowers us to collaborate with our clients and each other in unparalleled ways and compellingly increases our working effectiveness. We created office space that is easily adaptable, enabling us, in a sustainable way, to accommodate both anticipated and unanticipated changes in our industry and the ways we serve our clients. Both through the visioning process we pursued and with the resulting exceptional office space we designed and constructed, we have reinforced our unparalleled culture and our collegial connectivity. By setting our goals so high and then patiently working our way through the “process of change,” we cracked the code on leading professionals through a significant transformation. For the other offices within our firm, we not only set a new precedent for office design, but also confirmed that innovative change in a law firm (is not an oxymoron and) is achievable. And, of vital importance to many, by virtue of this process, we saved our firm staggering amounts of money.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this story - where I will share with you some of the specific accomplishments we achieved in our law firm office of the future.
