Welcome back to the Big Law Business column on the changing legal marketplace written by me, Roy Strom. Today, we look at the rise of office-free (or office-lite, at least) law firms have thrived during the pandemic. Sign up to receive this column in your Inbox on Thursday mornings.
The law firm John Lively launched in 2018 with 11 lawyers wasn’t conventional—it’s called Practus LLP—but the concept wasn’t exactly novel, either. Its lawyers would work from home and they’d keep a larger share of the fees they collected, thanks to the firm’s lower overhead costs.
Four years and a global pandemic later, the Big Law firms that Lively poaches lawyers from have caught on to one of those ideas: Everybody knows they can work from home. But those large firms are struggling to cut one of their biggest costs. They’re stuck with long-term, Class A office leases that feel like gaudy stapler graveyards as lawyers resist returning to the office.
Now, alternative firm leaders are pitching their model as a way for individual partners to opt out of paying for high-priced space—which takes a chunk out of their profits—without the headache of fighting colleagues who want to cling to the status quo.
“It opened people’s eyes,” Lively said of the pandemic. “As these firms adopt policies to force people to come back in, you’re going to see many lawyers say, ‘I want to make a choice.’”
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