5 tips on how to make WFH work for small firms and in-house legal departments 

As a lawyer and business owner pre-Covid I had zero tolerance for remote work.  Covid changed that with a HUGE unexpected upside: recruiting went from local to national, and finding high quality talent became easier even in a very tight market.

Finding the right people is a challenge for every business, but it’s particularly hard for small to medium sized legal teams.  So how about re-framing the discussion on WFH to focus on the recruiting benefits for employers?

Making WFH actually work for the employer is hard and requires investments in your business.  Since I’ve done this myself, I thought I would share my experiences in this blog.

In this post we’ll cover:

• How to define remote work

• The surprising upside for employers

• Management challenges that come with remote work

• 5 Tips on making remote work, work for employers

What is remote work?

For my purposes, remote work simply means the geographic distribution of staff and the presence of an established office in a specific market are no longer considerations when I make hiring decisions.

The surprising upside of remote work for employers

The most important benefit, hands down, for me has been the ability to access a large pool of talent by recruiting nationally rather than locally.  Not only is it now easier to find people, but I’m not locked into a cost of living premium tied to physical office locations.  That can create a huge opportunity for firms to compete on rates with firms that don’t have that flexibility.

Management challenges that come with remote work

In my experience, the core management challenge when it comes to remote working arrangements is a) creating confidence in a team's productivity and b) establishing personal connections that promote loyalty and emotional well being.

In a physical working environment we can just walk the halls to see who is there and pop our head into someone’s office to ask how things are going, a technique called “management by walking around”.

Management by walking around doesn’t work when you have remote teams, so employers have to apply a whole different set of techniques to create confidence in a team’s productivity and personal connections.  Fortunately, there are proven techniques to achieve both.

5 Tips for making remote work, work

So, if this sounds compelling, here are 5 tips that I have pulled together based on my personal experience and conversations with other lawyers.

Tip 💡# 1: Employee surveys

Employee surveys are a powerful tool to learn about how your team is doing.  The most common employee survey categories are: employee engagement, employee satisfaction and company culture surveys.

Online tools like Typeform have templates for employee surveys that are easy to tweak based on your specific needs.  And what’s even better, these tools collect results, produce reports and allow you to observe how responses change over time using graphs and charts.

Tip 💡# 2: Measure performance

I think this is the hardest thing for lawyers to wrap their head around, but performance has to be measured.  Different legal organizations have different goals, clients requirements (whether internal or external) and specialties, so there is no one-size-fits-all approach to measuring performance.  But that doesn't mean it has to be hard or complicated.  Actually the simpler the better.  There is a ton of literature on this subject.  To learn more just google “KPIs for legal practices”.

Tip 💡# 3: Use technology to support organization and collaboration.

Many legal service organizations have multiple technology projects in the works.  If your objective is to support remote working arrangements, prioritize initiatives that help your team get and stay organized and collaborate effectively.  One way to do that is to use an app I recently launched called Clausebook, a free service that helps lawyers build, use and share form files and clause libraries across internal and external teams.

Tip 💡# 4: Calendar community time

Just because you aren’t all in one office doesn’t mean you can’t get together virtually.  Our team schedules a social hour monthly where everyone connects on Zoom and plays interactive online games together.  Other options include having a weekly or monthly breakfast, lunch or happy hour as a group.  A nice way to blend the “real” and “virtual” worlds is to order food from for each member of the team and have it delivered to wherever your team members are located.

Tip 💡# 5: Conduct off-sites

A well done off-site is one of the very best tools managers have to create personal connections that support loyalty and emotional well being.  They can also be a huge productivity boost.  But for small firms they can be hard to pull off since they can be expensive and difficult to organize.  So use the $$ you save on rent to cover travel, meals and entertainment, and hire an off-site facilitator to build an agenda and assist with logistics.  

⭐️ Pro Tip ⭐️: It’s easy to find administrative and logistical help for an off-site at a reasonable pricing using online marketplaces of freelancers like Upwork.  See my recent blog post on how to free up time by using freelancers for a How To Guide on using these marketplaces.

⭐️ Pro Tip ⭐️:  Offsites do not have to be expensive.  I’ve done them at apartments I found on Airbnb and even at my own house.  I’ve even done blended offsites where most people participated in person while a limited number of others participated remotely.

About Gabriel

Gabriel is a commercial real estate attorney who left practice to co-found LeasePilot, a software platform that helps commercial real estate companies draft, revise and abstract their leases faster.

In addition to serving as LeasePilot’s CEO, Gabriel is launching a new product called Clausebook designed to help lawyers achieve a greater degree of organization and efficiency so they can elevate the level of their individual practices.