How Viable Is Remote Work For Lawyers?

This month on the Answering Legal blog, we’ll be covering remote work in the legal world. Since the rapid adaptations required by quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work has steadily been on the rise across all sectors of the economy, both private and public.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one out of every five workers teleworked in August of 2023. But what about in the legal sphere? Compared to the greater workforce, how have lawyers adapted to remote work?

That question is the subject of this week’s entry in our June blog theme. Below, we’ll be exploring the viability of remote work for lawyers, going into the pros and cons of taking your firm virtual, and bringing in some numbers to back up our findings.

Reasons To Switch To Remote Work For Lawyers

There are a lot of incentives to remote work for lawyers, especially for solos and small firms. Between overhead, flexibility, and efficiency, taking your firm virtual, even if only for a few days a week, can be a big boon for your business.

No reduction in overhead is without cost—we’ll discuss costs in our next section—but paying less or no rent is without a doubt an improvement on your firm’s balance sheet, if nowhere else. Totally eliminating rent paid on physical office space is certainly on the table, especially for attorneys working from home, but that’s not the only option to reduce overhead. For example, if you’re only in the office two days a week, do you really need such a big space?

Downsizing an office you rarely use will be a huge boon to your firm. After all, many legal matters can be resolved completely virtually, in Zoom depositions, hearings, and even online trials. Others, however, require large-group in-person meetings, which means conference space, and in-person trials means that space needs to be close to the courthouse, to make trial appearances easy. The viability of going completely virtual is entirely dependent on your preference and your practice area, but a reduction in in-office hours is probably available to firms of all kinds.

Next week we’ll dive deeper into the topic of remote work for lawyers and legal tech, but suffice it to say that many firms already have a lot of the tech tools they’ll need to go virtual. For the firms that don’t, upgrading your technology can actually be a huge boon to your firm. Sure, there’s an upfront cost, but that’s an investment in your business. The tech upgrade you need to go remote might, after an adjustment period, make your firm much more efficient.

Bringing both of those elements together, remote work will make your firm much more flexible. You’ll be able to work from anywhere. You won’t be tied to a single desk—you can work from your favorite coffee shop if you want! And your schedule can better fit your life, whether that’s taking the kids to school in the morning, midday exercise, or easily enjoying a meal with your spouse.

Possible Issues With Remote Work For Lawyers

Unfortunately, there are very few things in life that don’t come with their own sets of costs or drawbacks, and remote work for lawyers is no different. In this section, we’ll address common concerns attorneys have about shifting to remote work, from space and perception to law firm culture.

Depending on the size of your firm, you might feel cramped with a lack of space. Downsizing your office because you’re only there two days a week, for example, is a lot easier if there are two attorneys than if they are five. There are definitely also people who prefer to have a permanent workspace separated from their home. Some attorneys might find it harder to avoid working while “off” if their office is right down the hallway!

As we’ll demonstrate in the next section, public perception on remote work for lawyers is shifting, but there are definitely some clients that might expect the full office treatment. Those clients might be disappointed they don’t get to sit across from your stately cherrywood desk and consult on a legal matter. This issue is one only you can judge. How important is the formality of an office to your clientele?

Finally, this factor won’t be an issue for solo attorneys, but some law firm owners are concerned about firm culture and cooperation when going remote. We have a guide to making sure that isn’t a problem here, inspired by an interview on our Everything Except The Law podcast with an expert in law firm culture and teambuilding. Essentially, if you want to build a firm culture in an age of remote work, you have to forego the serendipitous culture of in-office chatter and build a more intentional culture.

Every firm is unique, and so every firm will be affected by these factors in different ways. If you’re not comfortable downsizing your physical office space, or think you might be too tempted to work on the weekends if your office is right next door to your bedroom, then maybe remote work is not right for your firm! Still, we think the statistics in the next section might be enough to change your mind.

Remote Work For Lawyers Is On The Rise

It is our opinion that remote work is actually very viable for lawyers. In fact, we’d argue that the law is one of the professions best suited to remote work. Certainly more so than the medical field, for example.

But the law is also a very slow-moving field. Without the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine, it’s possible that remote work wouldn’t be as common or as well-received as it is amongst both lawyers and legal consumers. Below, we’ll dive into the perspectives of clients and lawyers to analyze how they feel about remote work and its effects on productivity and culture.

How Do Clients Feel About Remote Work For Lawyers?

The journey of client sentiment about remote work for lawyers is indicative of a general trend among the public, as more and more people have eschewed office space in favor of going virtual. Over the last few years, feelings across the board have shifted from “unsure” to “enthusiastic”.

Clio’s Legal Trends Report is a great resource on this topic. Pre-COVID-19, in 2018, it found that only 23 percent of surveyed legal consumers were open to working with a lawyer remotely. Likewise, in 2019, only 32 percent of clients thought fully remote work for lawyers was a good idea.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed things, however. By 2020, 56 percent of clients preferred videoconferencing over a phone call, and in 2021 79 percent of legal consumers indicated that they were actively looking for remote options when hiring.

What can we learn from this data? Well, before 2020, clients were skeptical about remote work for lawyers. The data doesn’t analyze their reasons for feeling the way they do, but certainly some clients felt like their needs wouldn’t be served by a virtual lawyer.

After 2020, however, things change entirely. 77 percent of clients were unwilling to work with a lawyer remotely in 2018, but 79 percent in 2021, just three years later, were actively looking for remote communication avenues with their attorneys! That’s a total reversal of opinions on remote work for lawyers in just three years. Clearly clients don’t mind a virtual lawyer nearly as much as they used to, and some are actively excited about the prospect.

How Do Attorneys Feel About Working Remotely?

Similarly, the way lawyers feel about remote work has shifted since the pandemic, although much less drastically. It’s difficult to find pre-pandemic data on this subject; how would anyone in 2019 have known how important remote work would become for lawyers just a year later? But based on the trends indicated in this data, we can make some inferences.

In the 2020 Legal Trends Report, Clio found that 21 percent of lawyers already operated without commercial office space. 83 percent were already meeting clients through video conferencing, and a physical office was considered the least impactful metric toward determining a firm’s future success. By 2022 however, fewer than 30 percent of lawyers surveyed continue to work only from the office.

This data doesn’t paint as definitive a picture as the same data on the clients’ side of the conversation, but it’s still clear. In 2020, after months of lockdown, about one in five lawyers operated without office space, but four in five were working remotely with clients. Just two years later, fewer than a third of lawyers worked only from the office! It’s clear that physical offices are mattering less and less to both clients and attorneys, which makes rent a great place to cut costs.

Impacts Of Remote Work For Lawyers On Their Productivity

Many attorneys, while concerned about what their colleagues and clients might think about their decision to go remote, are more concerned about how becoming a virtual law firm will affect their productivity. Solos might be worried about how they’ll be able to focus with so many distractions available in their homes. Owners of larger firms might be worried about the productivity of their staff, in addition to their own.

Statistics show that there’s nothing to worry about. In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Clio’s Legal Trends Report found that 58 percent of lawyers found that work-from-home technology improved their work/life balance.

Meanwhile, in 2022, 49 percent of lawyers said they worked best from home, compared to smaller percentages of lawyers who felt it was the same or that they worked best from an office. And in their State of Small Law Firms Report in 2022, Thomson Reuters found that remote work was a significant challenge to only 4 percent of small law firms.

The takeaway from this data is that a loss of productivity is a bit of a boogeyman in the remote work environment. While it’s not an invalid concern, per se, it’s certainly not as much of a concern as it seems from the outside. Better work/life balance is good for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that it prevents burnout and improves productivity by improving motivation.

About half of the surveyed lawyers thought they worked best from home, and in the two years since that study was conducted, if the trends we’ve noticed in this blog hold, that number has probably risen considerably. But the nail in the coffin for the “productivity loss” argument is in that final data point. If productivity loss due to remote work was a real problem for lawyers, certainly more than a statistically negligible number of the surveyed firms would consider it a significant challenge!

Go Remote With Answering Legal

If you’re looking to go remote, a legal answering service is a must-have tool. Even if clients are more and more accepting of virtual conferences, phone calls are still the top way new clients will be getting in contact with you. Neglecting your phone lines will lead to a direct drop in your lead capturing capabilities.

That’s why you should invest in Answering Legal. Unlike other answering services, we can claim to be a true legal answering service because our virtual receptionists are highly trained and only answer for lawyers. You can learn more about our virtual receptionists here.

Our tech is great too. We’re constantly updating our proprietary software so that it integrates with more and more of the legal software you use every day. And we have a mobile app that’s perfect for a lawyer on the move!

Be sure to check back in to the Answering Legal blog next week, where we’ll discuss essential tech tools for the virtual lawyer. We’ll be diving into the tech you’ll need to make a smooth transition from the office to the home office, or wherever you want to work from.

Make your switch to remote work with confidence. Click here or call 631-686-9700 to sign up for our free trial. For a limited time, we’re offering firms that sign up for our service their first 400 minutes free.