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People first—developing a whole-firm back to the office policy

14 January 2022 / Rachel Lewis
Issue: 7962 / Categories: Features , Profession , Covid-19
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Rachel Lewis explains how her firm, Farrer & Co, has opted to keep the best of both worlds when it reorganised its working practices
  • The firm introduced an agile 40% in-office policy.
  • Staff have control over their working week.

The pandemic has prompted a collective reassessment of long-held working practices, which all businesses, including those in the legal profession, have had to address.

In our case at Farrer & Co, the transition to the entire firm working from home proved relatively straightforward and near-seamless on a practical level (thanks in no small part to the work of our IT department), with teams able to maintain client service levels, quality, and responsiveness. However, as the months began to roll by, many of us longed to see more of our colleagues and to get back to our much-loved collective professional home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

We therefore began to think about how we could develop a new working framework which could give us the best of both worlds.

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NEWS
One in five in-house lawyers suffer ‘high’ or ‘severe’ work-related stress, according to a report by global legal body, the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC)
The Legal Ombudsman’s (LeO’s) plea for a budget increase has been rejected by the Law Society and accepted only ‘with reluctance’ by conveyancers
Overcrowded prisons, mental health hospitals and immigration centres are failing to meet international and domestic human rights standards, the National Preventive Mechanism (NPM) has warned
Two speedier and more streamlined qualification routes have been launched for probate and conveyancing professionals
Workplace stress was a contributing factor in almost one in eight cases before the employment tribunal last year, indicating its endemic grip on the UK workplace
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