In Law Week Colorado’s December 2023 roundtable, participants discussed remote work and office policies around it, a paperless document management system, decreased utilization of staff and the uncertainty around artificial intelligence in the legal profession. Ryan Fletcher of Merchant & Gould, Brett Godfrey of Godfrey Law, John McHugh of Fennemore Craig, Michael Paul of Dinsmore & Shohl LLP and Merc Pittinos of Moye White joined the final roundtable discussion of the year.
The transcript below has been edited for clarity and length.
PITTINOS: I think the second question, Jess, that you brought up about our firms operating hybrid or remote? That’s a question that we talk about a lot. It comes up a lot from our attorneys and from our staff. And it’s something that I spent a lot of time reading about. I had an experience a couple of weeks ago where, on the same day, I had two people give me articles. One that basically said revenue growth is tied to being flexible and was pushing for a more remote work environment. Another article that said the only way that you can maintain culture is to be able to have people back in the office. And that to me frames the conflict that managing partners are dealing with every day that there’s not a clear answer. And for us, there’s not a clear answer, either for staff or for attorneys. What we’re finding is that the answers need to be targeted. Some of our highest performing attorneys that are most engaged in the firm culturally are the ones that are working remotely the most. There’s a new way of doing business and we need to be more flexible to be able to meet people where they are.
GODFREY: I agree with Mr. Pittinos. I think that in this day and age, people really have fallen into two categories of individuals when it comes to remote work. You’ve got the kind of folks who just got used to not having somebody breathing down their neck all day long and not being in the spotlight or being visible so they can kind of slack off. The other type of person is the type of person who gets much more done when they’re not having people knocking on their office door all the time, although that comes at a cost. But we’ve discovered that the only way to really determine which of those two types we get for interviewees would be to try them out. We try people out in the remote context, but we use a lot of metrics to keep track of what their performance is in terms of not just billable hours, but I keep an eye, on a randomized basis, [on] the interactions that we’re having with clients to sort of get a gauge of client happiness, as well as productivity, billable hours and all of that. But I think for a firm to succeed in a virtualized environment, you need those feedback tools, you need to have someone paying attention to the metrics of the individual workers who don’t have that day-to-day supervision or somebody to keep an eye on what they’re up to.
MCHUGH: Yeah, I think one of the big challenges on this is not so much… I guess it’s taking what we currently do and applying it to a new situation. Law firms are already analyzing whether you are fully in office or fully remote. There [are] already metrics for performance. And the difficulty I think that arose was finding ways to apply those metrics in a new situation, which is people being out of the office full-time. We experienced, during COVID, substantial growth in working attorney hours. During complete lockdowns, people were far more productive than they were before. Part of that is a commute. It’s not just people knocking on your door, but we all are in the Denver area, I think, and part of it is just commuting in and out of the office. I see my role in this as helping people succeed in the way that they want to work. The issue of people slacking, [in] my experience, was you have people slacking in the office just as much as you have slacking at home and we just have to deal with those equally.
FLETCHER: So [we] obviously recognize hybrid work environments are really important. And we have a policy right now — two days a week for everyone. What I’m curious about though, is how’s everyone addressing the much harder metrics to measure? So let’s just say for the partners who come to the office five days a week, they end up being a knowledge source much more often with newer attorneys, they often end up addressing a lot of other maintenance of a law firm type needs than the partners maybe who work from home five days a week. So how are you accounting for that aspect of it?
PAUL: Yeah, I think it’s an ongoing conversation that’s fluid. In my office, culture is really important. We’re a growing office and we continue to grow throughout COVID and beyond. And to Mr. McHugh’s point, with a lot of new people coming on board, it’s challenging to be fully remote because how do you mentor those young lawyers or the new staff? How do you build that culture, that community, that camaraderie that we all want in all of our offices? So I think it’s kind of a give and take. I think the metrics take care of themselves. I think we can all monitor that.
MCHUGH: I mean, for culture, we don’t have a required number of days in for attorneys. And we have several attorneys that pretty much take advantage of [that] full out. What I started doing is trying to implement systems to encourage people to come in. Every other week we have a staff training session where we teach the staff some aspects of the law so that they can learn it and provide lunch just [to] encourage the lawyers as well to come in and that I think goes better towards trying to preserve culture than mandating people come into the office. It’s difficult — people have gotten very, very used to being able to schedule, you know, ‘I gotta get a new refrigerator installed. I can work from home today,’ and have that flexibility and it’s hard especially if you have a decent number of attorneys who don’t come into the office. It’s very, very hard to tell associates and staff [they] have to come into the office if [the] partners that they’re working for aren’t here. If the whole team isn’t here, why do only some people have to show up?
GODFREY: That’s a great point.
MCHUGH: Yeah, encouraging rather than mandating.
FLETCHER: One of the things we’re seeing to your point, John, is we do have attorneys who work remote much more often. And the people who support those attorneys don’t want to be in the office. And then we have attorneys who work from the office much more often. And they want their support system or their support structure to be in the office to support them. And so now we’re running into this situation where the staff is [like], ‘Well, I don’t want to work for this attorney anymore. Maybe I want to go work for that attorney because I can work remote.’ Is anyone seeing that and how are you addressing those issues?
GODFREY: We see that issue. The thought is that, when you’re talking about partners who are self-starters and who have worked very hard to develop a book of business and they want to nurture that and take care of it, those are folks that are going to do pretty well in a remote environment because they don’t require as much training and they don’t require as much incentivization. But the larger the organization is, the more you’re going to lose a sliver of productivity — and by sliver, I mean possibly a big slice really — where you have folks that just don’t have the capability of being really at the job for so many hours a day, when they’re not in the environment where everybody else right next to him is working and where somebody’s keeping an eye on him. What we’ve discovered is that the key to long-term success of a firm is to keep quality high. And the best way to do that is training. So we do a weekly lunch and learn and it’s more or less mandatory that everyone comes. We plan it in advance very carefully so that we’re time efficient. It doesn’t last more than one hour. But it is preceded by about a half-hour chance to just talk about your cases and who’s having trouble with things and what issue are you struggling with right now?
PITTINOS: We’ve looked at it and seen a lot of opportunity with really, really high-quality employees by creating a sense of belonging in our firm where people can be themselves. We set things up and ask people from the first day that we’re interviewing them, ‘What is it that you like to do, what makes you most happy?’ And that’s what we found is creating a culture where people want to be around the people that they work with, and they love the work that they do. It’s a pretty simple model, but it’s hard to get right.
FLETCHER: If you don’t mind me asking to that point, do you involve staff in the interview process for other staff … or just the attorneys that they’ll be supporting?
PITTINOS: I think this happens at a lot of law firms where the attorneys are hiring for positions that they actually don’t even play a role in. And it disenfranchises the staff and creates a structure where the attorneys feel like they belong but the staff don’t and it’s really important we’ve involved our staff — and involving them more frequently— in hiring decisions because their insights are phenomenal. Some of them have been working in law firms five/10 times longer than some of the attorneys. They know what good hires are. They’ve got a different way of looking at hiring. And their input for us has been extraordinarily helpful in making better hiring decisions.
MCHUGH: Since we’re on the topic of staff and remote work, one thing that we noted is utilization of staff. Is anyone experiencing a decrease in utilization of staff? For us, it’s been tied to remote work … If everyone was remote, it was sometimes just easier to do things for yourself rather than jumping on a call or a Zoom. You used to walk down the hallway and say ‘Hey, can you do this or x or y or z?’ And there seems to be a little bit of a lingering in that or attorneys are leaning more towards just doing things that they’ve gotten used to doing on their own instead of utilizing staff, and I’m wondering if anyone else is seeing that and what you’re doing to address it.
FLETCHER: We’re certainly seeing it. And I would say the Monday/Friday events if you’re in the office, people tend to be more self-sufficient because we may not have as much staff or any staff in the office on those days. So the little things like copying or whatever. I find that attorneys are becoming much more self-sufficient. As far as what we’re doing to address that, it’s a great question. And I do think it’s tricky because — I’ll use our litigation group as an example. So in our litigation group, [which] tends to be a little bit more paper-heavy and wants direct support all the time, we are starting to have those conversations about ‘Well hey, you know you got some flexibility to come and go, staff people come and go, you know, during the work week, but can you guys work amongst yourselves potentially to make sure someone wants to come in this Friday or someone wants to come in on Monday?’ And so we started kind of having that back-and-forth conversation to see if that addresses the issue.
PAUL: To the point earlier, we’ve encouraged people to come in more by making it fun, by having events and having things for us to get together inside and outside of the office. We haven’t had the issues of lawyers having to do it themselves. Because one, there’s somebody who’s always there. And two, we’ve seen more and more people come back to the office as time has gone on. So I think those two things have made it a little bit better, but it is certainly a challenge that everybody I’m sure is facing.
GODFREY: I think one of the factors that differentiates how well a firm does with remote workers is its size. I think I’m pretty sure that all of the speakers in today’s panel have firms that are larger than mine. We do pure litigation, and we’re totally paperless. And I kind of wonder among you, gentlemen, how many of you are totally paperless to the extent that anyone can access any document from home anytime and well organized so that it doesn’t take a long time?
FLETCHER: That’s a great question, Brett. We are paperless as a law firm generally. It’s definitely from a litigation perspective. Anyone who has access to our system remotely or in the office has access to all the files. Now, having said that, there are certainly personal preferences amongst attorneys about whether they want to highlight their deposition transcripts on paper or they want to do it digitally, or if they want to review something on paper. And so that’s what tends to create the issues.
GODFREY: We solved that with a dictatorial decree.
[GROUP LAUGHS]
PITTINOS: We have a great platform … of IT tools, but what we’re realizing [is] that we need to invest more heavily in training and how to use those tools. And what we’ve also noticed is that law firms tend to be late adapters to technology, and so we’re starting to use more and more of the tools that our clients are using, and having our legal assistants learn how to use those tools to be able to better integrate with our clients so that they have more insight into what we’re working on, what the status of projects is, when [it’ll] be completed. For us, there’s less utilization and so we’re starting to rethink how we’re utilizing legal assistance, and they’re just doing different things than historically, and for us that’s helped us to improve the quality of our client service. And it’s helped our lawyers focus on legal work and not on the technology. And it’s given our legal assistants a better experience because they’re growing throughout their careers and they’re learning new skills.
MCHUGH: It’s interesting to me the whole paperless thing. Yes, everything is accessible electronically. Are we paperless? No. Would we like to be? Yes. And I think not just from an efficiency and accessibility issue as far as not having some key documents stuck in somebody’s office with their write-up on it and nobody else can find it. But also just from the stewardship perspective, [it] helps bottom line but also does what we can to help with environmental issues and things like that. It’s kind of a win-win if you can convince people to do it. And I say that as somebody who, as of yet has not been convinced to do it. I am far, far, far too dependent on my highlighted annotated pieces of paper than I should be. I think that’s a big way that law firms are moving towards [it] is trying to get everybody more and more and more paperless. And there’s —
GODFREY: — there’s a big difference between document archiving and the cloud, and a true fully functional document management system. And of course, people ask, what’s the difference? And first and foremost is automated workflows. And then secondly, a really robust structure of metadata. We found that if we are diligent in metadata application to new documents, we use a highly, highly customized SharePoint system for that with lots of automated workflows. We speed up radically our ability to access documents in what I loosely refer to as the million-document-plus cases. If you have something more than just an archival system, where you’ve got some level of automation that is only made possible by the upfront investment of the entry of the metadata and developing the system, then you have this total freedom from the office at that point, because when you look at larger firms where there’s the individual right to print documents out just to read them, and people have working copies that are utterly unique and their physical paper and there’s no copy anywhere. And you let some of the people do that. We find the whole system breaks down. It’s got to be sort of an all or nothing thing. … Everybody gets an iPad, everybody gets a Mac and you can highlight, annotate, bookmark everything you want with your iPad on your documents. So you don’t have to be frozen in a chair to set distance from your screen. But when people start to get used to it, they look back with a kind of a blush and they’re sort of embarrassed that they put up such a stink at the beginning. But there is definitely an adjustment process there. Younger lawyers have [a] much easier time with that than older lawyers. And to me from a standpoint of managing a law firm, we’re much more concerned with proper utilization of our technology than we are with where they were.
FLETCHER: Brett, are you dedicating a significant amount of resources to training? I don’t think the younger lawyers need it that much, but I would say probably Gen X and Baby Boomers probably need it.
GODFREY: Yeah, what we’ve done is we created a checklist of learning items and many of those checklist items have training videos that go with them. So we’ve got dozens and dozens and dozens of training videos that show how to perform each of the steps. And they go from the big picture all the way down to individual steps. And we’ve structured the order in which people go through those training materials, including a lot of written bulletins. And yeah, it’s a huge investment up front. And other law firms, when I talked to them about it, because I’m really passionate on this subject, and when I talk to other law firms about it, an awful lot of them are like ‘Well, we just don’t have time to bring everything to a halt and install some kind of mega system like this.’ And I always tell them, you don’t necessarily do it that way. You do it a step at a time, but with a goal of getting to that location. I hope that answered your question.
FLETCHER: Yeah, for sure.
PAUL: We’re paperless here in Denver. I know that the firm has pushed that really hard and I know it has taken time and it has taken baby steps. But we eventually got everybody here and I’m not suggesting that there wasn’t some resistance — there was — but we ultimately got them there. And I agree with you. It is so much easier and it’s so far superior to the mix and match that you find in so many places. If everyone’s consistent and everyone does the same thing. So I think it’s the way to go. I just think that you have to be realistic. It does take time, it does take steps, but you can certainly get there.
GODFREY: John made a good point talking about the fact that there’s lots of metrics and it sounds like he’s got a very sophisticated firm with monitoring those things. But going back to these more sophisticated overarching technological systems, those provide incredible opportunities for performance measurement, because I can look at a file and I can see how many times a person’s accessed that file, in any given unit of time. I can see how many times they’ve accessed certain kinds of documents. If I’m looking at a younger lawyer and I want to know if they’re really performing the work I need them to do at the intensity level and the operational tempo that I require.
FLETCHER: If no one minds, I’m just going to shift the topic really quickly. I’m just curious, since we’ve been talking about hybrid and hybrid work environments, is anyone adjusting what their office space configuration looks like in view of the conversations we’re having and if you are how so?
GODFREY: We sold our office building.
FLETCHER: [Laughs] Good answer.
MCHUGH: Yeah, we have several — not Denver — but we have several offices that are either in the process or have already shrunk their footprint based on basically evaluating how often people were coming in, and what the needs are, and moving more towards a hotel system for offices, and I know a lot of firms are doing that.
PITTINOS: We just moved to a new office over the summer. The architecture of the office is totally different than our old office. The location of it is in RiNo. We’re the first big firm to move there and part of that was to be able to drive up the culture of our firm because we see the city as moving towards RiNo. That’s a place where young people want to be. Within the office itself, the offices are much smaller than they were at our old space. There are a lot of shared offices. There are a lot more collaborative spaces where people can work together. And we’re able to do that, and the building itself is just a more comfortable place to work so that even though the offices are smaller, it creates a sense of this is someplace that you want to be.
FLETCHER: We’re evaluating office space in Denver right now. And that’s why I ask — so there’s a lot of factors that go into it. And it’s rather complicated.
PAUL: Yeah, I mean, we’re definitely doing more expansion. So we actually just negotiated a new lease in our building, and we’re taking a whole floor so we’re gonna go the opposite direction of Brett as well. We have a lot of collaborative space there. There [are] a lot of areas where people can congregate and discuss cases and be together as groups. So the format of the floor is changing in that regard. But again, with the added growth, and the new people that we’re adding on that are there more often, you need space to be able to accommodate that. So we have doubled down [on] what’s worked for us, and I think that’s the direction we’ve decided to go. But I certainly understand how other people have gone other directions.
GODFREY: When you look at a firm like Wheeler Trigg, for example, they’ve got several premium floors in Republic Plaza. And I maintained an office there for about 12 years, and it’s premium Class A space, and the rent is stiff there, especially for the really special top floors that Wheeler Trigg has. And I look at that, and I wonder what kind of conversations do those people have when they discuss the annual cost just for rent of that space? … You always need a good, fancy place to talk to clients. But that’s all you really need. …I think how much money could go into the pockets of firms like Wheeler Trigg with that much premium space — and they’re not using it as much as they thought they would when they signed the contract, at least some of the senior people there tell me that. … It’s amazing what it does to the bottom line if you don’t spend that money, and for hundreds of years, law firms had fancy offices. So it’s a huge psychological leap to get to the notion of trying to experiment like we’re doing, but it definitely saves a lot of money.
PAUL: Although I will add, certainly right now is an excellent time to negotiate a lease. [Group laughs]. If there was ever a time to do it. We got a wonderful deal on our space and that was one of the factors that we looked into because there is a cost savings — we were already hotelling to the maximum ability that we could, but we were still running out of space. So if you were ever going to do it, I think now would be the time
LAW WEEK: I do have a quick question for you all based on a previous discussion point focused on AI. Have any of your firms implemented an AI-use policy across single or multiple departments and if so, what does that policy look like for you?
GODFREY: We have. We’ve done a ton of experimentation with more than one platform. But most of the so-called platforms tie back to Open AI. And we’ve all heard the story of the lawyer in Florida who submitted a brief with made-up case names and that sort of thing. So what we do is we require independent verification of every major point that’s pulled out of an AI platform. But I push my people not to get too much in love with that. We love playing with it and we’ve had some fantastic research results with it. But at the end of the day, if you’re citing legal authority, it’s got to come from Westlaw.
MCHUGH: So we have a group that is actually dedicated to evaluating different AI tools available to law firms. We’re testing out some of them to see how they work. So a little more control on the front end [to] find those platforms that really work [and] make things more efficient. You know, some of those programs like Open AI don’t seem to make a ton of sense, but some of them appear to be incredibly good aggregators of research. And so we are pursuing that and looking at the different tools that you can have because certainly that is the wave of the future. … The question that we’re also starting to evaluate is how do you price that into your services to your clients, as AI becomes more and more available? Is it going to be kind of like Westlaw where it’s just assumed that a law firm at a certain level is operating that and that’s just the price of doing business?
GODFREY: There’s no way to analyze what you’re talking about right now. Because when we use the word AI, we’re operating with what we think we know about AI, which is exactly nothing compared to what we will know in six months.
PAUL: Lots of risk, there are lots of things to consider. We have a group of people as well in my firm that are analyzing all the various tools — seems like they come out daily. It’s a fast-moving part of our industry. And to Brett’s point, it’s just going to continue to expand and continue to come out with new stuff. So we’re just being a little cautious, but it is the future. We will be utilizing it in every phase of a firm [at] one point or another. But there are risks and we are aware of that and just trying to be careful.
PITTINOS: It’s just a fascinating time to be a lawyer because the transformation that’s happening truly is — there’s not been anything like it. … on the one hand, they’re incredible tools, [but it] requires a ton of training to figure out how to use them, the way you use them changes on a monthly basis. And for us, you have to be really careful about also protecting client confidences. It’s not for us as lawyers. But I think that ultimately it helps to improve the experience that our clients have.
GODFREY: This has been fascinating.
MCHUGH: I know one thing I’m looking forward to seeing how AI impacts jury selection
GODFREY: That is the ultimate question.
FLETCHER: Wow.
CORRECTION NOTE: This article was updated Dec. 18 with the correct spelling of Merc Pittinos’ name. Law Week regrets the error.