How to Approach Work-from-Home in Legal

As work-from-home policies are reevaluated, law firms must consider productivity, data safety and employee satisfaction when creating new policies.

By Alex Heshmaty

July 2025

Cast your mind back five years to the first year of the pandemic, and most law firms were still scrambling to try and figure out the best way to facilitate working from home (WFH). Although most restrictions were lifted a couple years later, many lawyers continued to primarily work remotely and still do to this day. However, there has been an ongoing debate about getting workers back into the office more generally, so what is the current state of the legal sector and WFH policies?

Backlash to WFH

Although many companies and government departments continued to allow a far greater degree of flexibility regarding remote working post-COVID compared to before, more recently, there have been multiple calls from various business leaders to reverse the trend. This included Elon Musk, during his stint as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), threatening to place any federal employees who refused to return to working in government offices on administrative leave. Although many government departments subsequently backtracked on these warnings, his pronouncement was arguably a barometer of the feeling among many business executives.

Current State of WFH in the Legal Sector

Prior to COVID, around 70-90% of law firms required their staff to work primarily from the office, a figure that was almost turned on its head by the end of the pandemic, with the American Bar Association reporting in 2022 that 87% of firms were allowing their lawyers to work remotely. The situation has recalibrated since then, with one study indicating that 57% of legal sector employees are once again office-based in 2025.

Firms have starkly different approaches to the debate. Some are clearly applying pressure on their staff to return to the office, such as by threatening to withhold bonuses from junior lawyers if they insist on working solely from home. Other firms tout their completely flexible working arrangements.

Smaller firms have some unique requirements around WFH. Cheryl Gaslowitz, Executive Director at Gaslowitz Frankel LLC, says, “We stayed out during COVID much longer than most law firms in Atlanta, not returning until September 2022. When we did return, we agreed to keep at least a hybrid schedule of three days in the office and two days at home.”

Since they are a small firm of six attorneys and five staff, the only way a hybrid schedule made sense was if they all worked the same schedule. Her firm has employees work Monday, Wednesday and Thursday in the office, and they work Tuesdays and Fridays at home. “We continue on that same schedule today and there are no current plans to change it,” Gaslowitz says.

Client Confidentiality and WFH

One of the more challenging aspects of WFH for legal professionals is ensuring that sensitive client data is protected. Any data protection breach can cause significant reputational damage to a law firm and result in disciplinary action. Joanne Brook, Consultant Solicitor at Lionshead Law, notes that “policing” the use of personal devices and multiple users can be problematic.

One of the more challenging aspects of WFH for legal professionals is ensuring that sensitive client data is protected.

“Failing to save a piece of work ‘on to the system’ because it has been done on the fly on another device can happen, and it creates issues of confidentiality as well as poor document management,” Brook says. However, she notes that most lawyers are “cautious creatures who take extra steps to avoid risk and breach.”

Nevertheless, any physical loss of a device containing client data “causes grave issues of data and confidentiality breach — and potentially the more back-and-forth to an office that is done, the more the risk increases,” she explains. So, although firms need to be cognizant of their data protection duties in the context of WFH, this issue can generally be managed with the right processes.

Does WFH Affect Productivity?

One key question is whether lawyers work more efficiently from the office or at home. According to Brook, it depends. “We now have a whole generation of practitioners who qualified when WFH has been the norm. Their method of practice incorporates this, and all practitioners know when it suits them best to WFH in their work cycle,” she says. As a technology lawyer, Brook says she has been working from home regularly since the late 1990s since her type of work, complex contracts, lends itself to the longer periods of uninterrupted focus that WFH provides.

“The only times I can imagine [that] being in the office helps is in large transactions or litigation where a team delivers the best results when it is literally working together, and for trainees who are learning the craft of being a [lawyer]. But, of course, so much of that depends on the quality of the actual training given,” Brook says. She notes, however, that “WFH can be socially isolating, and lawyers who thrive best when validated by others in-person obviously won’t work well from home.”

Whether work performance is positively or negatively impacted by remote working will often come down to the various characteristics of individual lawyers. Gaslowitz says that it depends on the attorney and the work. “One of the reasons we eventually came back was because some of the attorneys felt that there was something missing by not being in the office. While we had all become perfectly adept at using virtual meeting platforms, there was something about being able to stop by someone’s office for a question or share ideas or gather for a strategy session on a case. That was missing in the work from home environment,” she explains.

On the other hand, she says that administrative staff at the firm generally preferred working from home because they get more done without the constant interruptions that are often common in the office. They “were admittedly disappointed to return to the office,” but having a hybrid schedule “helped ease the return,” Gaslowitz says.

Is Hybrid the Sweet Spot?

Considering the different opinions and preferences within the legal profession regarding WFH, perhaps the optimal choice is something in the middle. Gaslowitz certainly thinks that a hybrid model works for her firm, with one of the biggest advantages being that “we all have everything we need to work from home, if necessary, or on a moment’s notice.”

She provides an example of a legal assistant at her firm who has a school age child. “Pre-COVID, if her child was home sick and she needed to be home with her, it meant we had no one at the office to do the work. Now, if she has to be home, or someone else needs to be home to meet a repair person or a delivery person, they are still able to do their work,” Gaslowitz says. According to her, the firm is more agile because staff are able to “switch between working in the office and working from home” seamlessly without any impact upon their work.

About the Author

Alex Heshmaty

Freelance Writer
Legal Words

Alex Heshmaty is a U.K.-based freelance copywriter and journalist, specializing in law and technology. He runs content marketing agency Legal Words, offering blogging and content creation for a wide range of businesses, including law firms and IT companies. Heshmaty has written extensively about the impact of technological developments on both lawyers and their clients.

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