From Bauhaus to Your House

Novelists questioned about how they write, and more specifically about how they come up with their plots, sometimes respond to the effect that, "The characters took on a life of their own; they told me what they were going to do next."

I occasionally have the same feeling, albeit on a far less exalted plane, analyzing a specific aspect of the mammoth landscape of "the economics of law firms."  This article, in particular, thinks it's about new "open plan" designs for law firm offices:  Architecture which, rather than stringing identical offices down long corridors, punctuated by conference rooms, secretarial pods, and perhaps a depressing and banal lunchroom, features more open work areas, coffee/espresso or snack stations designed to encourage mingling, "hot desks," ubiquitous WiFi availability, a wider array of large and small conference rooms and war rooms, and a generally non-traditional layout.

First, to the merits of the new design mentality:  Few propose depriving lawyers of conventional offices altogether, but rather to make them smaller (too small to hold a meeting) and to devote a relatively greater proportion of floor space to common areas.  Lawyers actually work collaboratively more than they may realize, and this only serves that reality.  Technology is also a driver:  Documents and files are—or should be!—stored on centralized servers, so they are equally available everywhere.  Cost, last but not least, is reduced with this type of "build-out." 

[On a personal note, I can report that my wife's ad agency recently moved from conventional offices in the Chrysler Building to new "loft-like," open-plan space in the garment district, and her office went from a spacious and prime corner to a 6' x 10' windowless cookie-cutter. She loved it, as did practically everyone else.]

The merits of this design philosophy, then, I leave to your judgment in light of the idiosyncrasies of your firm and the relevant egos.

By far the most interesting point, however, is how the very use of space by law firms is changing, in two key ways:

• When firms move, they almost invariably grossly under-estimate the amount of growth they will experience, and space they will need, over the life of the new lease. If the move was undertaken to consolidate scattered or inconveniently-contiguous departments, then, it will be a failure at least on that score.
• The ratio of support:professional personnel, now in the neighborhood of 1:1, will decline and perhaps will decline drastically if back-office functions are outsourced across the globe or across the river. This in turn implies that you cannot intelligently design your new space without asking what the nature of all of your practice-support and other "invisible" functions will look like by the end of the new lease term.

In other words, an article that started out being about glorified interior design ended up being about the most challenging "what next" analysis.

Your office space is, to be sure, the visual distillation of your brand, your identity, and your character; but none of those elements is entirely static.  So should your space not be.