EDITOR’S LETTER – MAY

When we carried out our annual Legal IT landscapes research in November/December 2019, the section on agile working and hotdesking made for some slightly puzzling reading. We’ve long tracked how firms are doing in terms of having ‘significantly’ (over 10%) more employees than desks in the office for them all – and have generally found increased appetite for the arrangement year after year. More firm leaders say they are already doing it; and of those that aren’t, more expect to get there sooner than said as much the year before.

Nothing very surprising there – office space is expensive, so it’s good if you don’t need to fill quite so much of it up with boring desks. You may simply need less space – or you might want to get more creative with those break-out spaces and client-facing areas instead. And after all, people quite like to work from home, right? When they really need to get their heads down. Or when it suits to have some flexibility to discharge other responsibilities or do other things. Or on Friday.

But last year, quite a surprise: a higher proportion than the year before said no, they would ‘never’ in fact go there (the desk reduction) and three-quarters felt they might just reach that 10% mark in between five and 10 years’ time.

I can accept that some of the people businesses want to retain may simply like having a desk (some, maybe even an office) to call their own – but looked at in light of what legal has had to make happen by hook or by crook in a few weeks, that’s pretty staggering. I do wonder if folks will ever be able to sigh and say ‘fear of change’ at a conference in quite the same way again …

As it happens, this issue was planned to focus on how far agile (or ‘smart’) working had come long before lockdown began to loom. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect people to believe that now – but read on for plenty of insight into what was top of mind for those managing this working transition in 2020 like no other (p15). Some, though by no means all, of this naturally involves choices about technology (and see much more on that theme from p29). Certainly, firms that have carefully invested in systems to help their people be more efficient, productive and collaborative over the years should be in a somewhat better place to meet this latest challenge.