Ninety percent of firms across the top 400 are executing a hybrid return-to-office plan. It’s not a question of whether the law firm of the future will be decentralized. It’s happening now. The question is, how will law firms make it all happen — the branding, the culture and client relations — when everything has changed?
A big part of the answer is hoteling. In law firms, hoteling is a bad word. However, for the Big Four consultancies — PwC, KPMG, Deloitte and Ernst & Young — hoteling has been a positive operational construct for over a decade, or in some cases longer. I’d argue that the success of the decentralized law firm depends in some part on how well firms can shift hoteling from the negative connotation of “losing my desk” to the positive connotation of “having a hotel-like experience,” as is the case in the Big Four.
Hoteling is like working in the office full time, but better. Here is how it may look for law firms.
THE BUSINESS CASE FOR HOTELING
The number 90% comes from the Return-to-Office Readiness Survey conducted by Forrest Solutions this past May and June, where we specifically wanted to understand how firms were going to operate a hybrid workforce.
What we found surprised us. Among myriad issues, firms were much more concerned about how they were going to manage their meeting rooms and office spaces moving forward than they were about, say, vaccination policies. Specifically, 82.75% of firms’ documented return plans included meeting room management and visitor screening, and only 27.59% included vaccination policies.
The widespread interest in meeting room management indicated a culture-wide shift toward hoteling concepts. Hoteling has long been successfully deployed in professional services firms where “clean desk” policies have long supplanted desk “ownership” and “private” office spaces. Technologies and solutions such as wayfinding, meeting room and desk booking platforms, virtual reception and brand ambassadors have been embraced to create seamless experiences for staff and visitors alike.
Based on use studies from UnWork — prior to the pandemic — the highest in-office desk utilization was 72%. This, in combination with a hybrid workforce, could result in more than 40% of office space being unoccupied at any given time. Emptiness is a very large motivator for firms to act on the second largest overhead cost at any law firm: real estate.
According to the 2021 Report on the State of the Legal Market from Georgetown University Law Center and the Thomson Reuters Institute, real estate comprises about $30,000 per lawyer per year. Firms stand to gain substantial savings through real estate reduction and increasing their desk utilization — as much as 3.5% of revenue by renegotiating leases or downsizing real estate needs anywhere between 10% to 30%.
But emptiness impacts another aspect of the firm: culture. So what is the cultural impact of emptiness?