We’re closing out the primary week of June, and it’s so sizzling on the east coast that you could really feel the brand new season creeping in. At one elite Biglaw agency, the powers that be have determined to permit staff to have one final summer season fling with hybrid work earlier than demanding that extra time be spent working from the workplace.
Yesterday, Hogan Lovells — a agency that introduced in $2,964,460,000 gross income in 2024, placing it at No. 11 in the latest Am Regulation 100 — introduced that starting in September, legal professionals are anticipated to be, “on common,” within the workplace “4 days every week throughout regular enterprise hours.” The agency’s rationale for making this variation is detailed in a memo from Richard Lorenzo, regional managing companion of the Americas (obtainable in full on the subsequent web page):
This shift is about fostering, the power, innovation, and connection that comes from working collectively. In-person collaboration permits us to share concepts organically and spontaneously, strengthens relationships, and enhances skilled progress, and connection in methods that aren’t at all times attainable remotely. In these day by day interactions, we mentor, problem-solve, and reinforce the tradition that units us aside. …
The momentary measures put in place in the course of the pandemic have developed, and whereas distant/hybrid work has its advantages, it has its challenges, together with skilled growth. Being collectively in individual creates an setting the place we are able to study, develop, and succeed, which requires a renewed deal with in-office collaboration.
Fortunately, the agency acknowledges that associates’ lives — starting from well being care appointments to child-related points — nonetheless exist outdoors of the workplace, and is permitting for some flexibility inside its new workplace attendance mandate, for these with “compelling” wants. The agency has additionally taken care to carve out a number of distant weeks all year long, together with the final week of August and the primary week of September (primarily based on native faculty calendars), the week of Thanksgiving (November 24-28), and the tip of December via the vacations (December 22-January 2).
Hogan Lovells now joins the likes of Davis Polk; Latham; Paul Weiss; Ropes & Gray; Simpson Thacher; Skadden; Vinson & Elkins; Weil Gotshal; WilmerHale; White & Case; and Sidley in its four-day, in-person attendance coverage. Sullivan & Cromwell has taken its attendance coverage one step additional, requiring attorneys to work from the workplace 5 days every week.
Better of luck to everybody at Hogan Lovells as they alter to their new lives, which will probably be principally spent on the workplace come September.
As quickly as you discover out about workplace attendance plans at your agency, please email us (topic line: “[Firm Name] Workplace Reopening”) or textual content us at (646) 820-8477. We at all times preserve our sources on tales nameless. There’s no must ship a memo (if one exists) utilizing your agency e mail account; your private e mail account is okay. If a memo has been circulated, please be sure you embody it as proof; we wish to submit full memos as a service to our readers. You possibly can take a photograph of the memo and fasten as an image if you’re apprehensive about metadata in a PDF or Phrase file. Thanks.
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Regulation, the place she’s labored since 2011. She’d love to listen to from you, so please be at liberty to email her with any suggestions, questions, feedback, or critiques. You possibly can observe her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or join along with her on LinkedIn.
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