Firms eye reopening offices

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Brian Grogan has never been in the office this much in his three decades at Moss & Barnett. As the firm’s president and CEO, though, Grogan has been at Moss & Barnett’s offices in downtown Minneapolis’ Fifth Street Towers almost every day for the past year to help keep operations going.

With his regular attendance, Grogan, usually on the road in client meetings, negotiations or at hearings, stands as an exception as law firms and other service businesses largely shifted to remote work in March 2020, when Gov. Tim Walz imposed work-from-home orders in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

That’s likely to change soon as firms contemplate reopening more widely with the state’s work-from-home mandate set to expire on April 15.

Attorneys and staff have been returning to offices since the late summer or fall, usually in small numbers and only a few days or partial days a week. Masks outside of individual offices, social distancing, possible health checks and plexiglass barriers around workstations in open areas are part of the new routine.

Precautions in place

Kitchens, conference rooms and common areas may be off-limits or have fewer chairs. Touchless faucet and toilet handles, soap dispensers and ice machines now may be in place. Clients may have to sign up in advance to visit and answer questions about possible coronavirus exposure or have their temperature taken.

Even as firms prepare to return, leaders concede that working from home likely will continue to some degree. The effect of remote work on collaboration and firm culture also is a concern. Firms, meanwhile, are looking forward to resuming in-person events and other client development activities after a year of webinars, online happy hours and thought leadership presentations.

Some firms will look for attorneys and staff to resume more regular office work after July Fourth or Labor Day. That’s subject to change, however as firms weigh also downtown safety concerns and anticipate protests during the trial of fired Minneapolis police offer Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd.

Firms are eager for downtown Minneapolis to reopen too, with 20 forming a strategic coalition to “help return downtown to its vibrancy at the appropriate time,” said Ann Rainhart, chief strategy officer at Taft’s Minneapolis office.

The firms are working on solutions with the Minneapolis Downtown Council, Minnesota Twins, Minnesota Vikings, Guthrie Theater and restaurants, said Rainhart, a coalition leader with Julie Henson, Taft’s chief client officer.

‘Most complicated time of our lives’

“We’re pretty passionate about Minneapolis,” said Rainhart. “You can make the choice as to whether you’re going to let somebody else solve the challenges or you’re going to start to try to be a proactive leader in helping sort through what is probably going to be the most complicated time in our lives.”

At Moss & Barnett, some 25 percent of the firm’s 70 attorneys, among 160 total employees, are in the office several times a week for part or all of a day to serve clients, Grogan said. He expects a gradual reopening.

“We don’t anticipate the proverbial flip the switch and everybody will be back,” Grogan said. “Our expectation is as people receive the vaccine, as their demands at home to care for parents or others that might be more susceptible to this, to see this slowly move from 30 percent to 50 percent to higher and organically get back to whatever that new normal looks like.”

Randall Pattee, managing partner at Fox Rothschild, which has 75 attorneys and 50 staff, said his “best guess” was that the firm would begin encouraging people to come back to the office after Labor Day. Up to a quarter of attorneys and staff are in the office on a given day.

“At this point and for the foreseeable future we’re not going to require anybody to return to the office,” Grogan said. “We also do expect that there will be much more flexibility about working from home versus being in the office five days a week.”

Remote work affects firm ‘personality’

As the shutdown has worn on, however, the office has lost a bit of its personality, Grogan said, and brainstorming trial strategy virtually is harder. “We haven’t decided anything but for those reasons I expect we will encourage people to come into the office sometimes and to interact with each other.”

Connie Lahn, managing partner of Barnes & Thornburg’s Minneapolis office, said no date is in place for a full return for the office’s 33 attorneys and 65 total employees. About 10 percent are in the office on a given day, Lahn said, “and that would be a busy day.”

“Setting a deadline like some firms have done and missing that deadline or changing it just causes more anguish than consistently communicating with the team, saying we’re working on it but we’re not setting a date yet,” Lahn said.

Tammera “Tami” Diehm, president of Winthrop & Weinstine, said the firm — with 130 attorneys among a total of 250 employees — is targeting July 5 as “the date at which we would like to see people take 90 days to transition and get back into a routine that works for you.”

Brett Larson, shareholder and chair of Messerli Kramer’s Minneapolis division, said the plan now is to reopen “in a more mandatory way” in September. The Minneapolis office has 45 attorneys and slightly more than 100 people total.

Mixing work from home, office ‘hoteling’

The office’s return-to-work strategy may include remote work and an office sharing or “hoteling” concept, which will be easier to manage with its same-sized offices, Larson said.

“Most of us have been working remotely for years, just not two or three days a week,” Larson said. “I think that remote work will be a bigger part of what we do going forward. A large percentage of our employees, both attorneys and non-attorneys, have responded very favorably in the surveys that we’ve conducted to some blend of work from home and work in the office.”

Taft was 60 percent of the way through an extensive remodeling of its offices in the IDS Center when the pandemic hit — too late to change plans, according to Justin Weinberg, Taft’s Minneapolis partner in charge. Not that he would have changed anything in the forward-looking design, one-size offices for partners and associates and large collaborative spaces.

“As luck would have it, we backed into having a rather pandemic-friendly space,” Weinberg said.

“Everything we built we built with the idea that we could change within five years if we needed to,” said Taft’s Rainhart. “We saw massive change coming but a pandemic wasn’t one of the things we discussed. But we did talk about the fact that the legal profession was drastically changing and that we needed to have flexibility.”