Is There A Downside To Working Remotely Within Law Firms
[00:00:00] What are your thoughts on remote opportunities? Can you work in a different market remotely?
That's a good question. Yes, you can. Lots of employers are hiring people to work remotely now, but there's problems with it.
I've seen situations where people have been hired on. Like I had someone that was hired in Texas on Zoom. When the firm made the offer, the person said, we're surprised I'm actually in LA or New Orleans or something, some different part of the country.
The firm was very upset. I think they were going to withdraw the offer. The firms have allowed the person to work remotely. So different people at different firms have different expectations. I'm actually of the belief personally, I've been with this particular type of work that I'm doing for a long time and my most productive employees, almost all working offices.
I think that law firms do want people on offices. There's just a lot of in-person learning and things that occur when you're working in an office. So I think law firms, they're selling their people. They're selling their culture, they're selling all sorts of things to clients.
You want people in [00:01:00] offices.
I think that the trend really is moving towards that. That's not to say that's going to be the norm forever, but I do think there's a trend towards that. If it was me, I would do whatever I could to try to work in an office to not look at working remotely. As a long-term opportunity, but many times, if you have certain skills that are rare in the market, that other people don't have, they'll allow it.
And I know there are firms out there that are allowing that right now. Very good firms like top Am Law firms in order to hire the right people are allowing them to work remotely. I think that there are a lot of remote opportunities out there. And I think that as long as the businesses are profitable and the law firms are doing well and they feel like they're getting good quality work that remote work is something that firms are into. But you have to be very careful when you're talking to firms about that, because there are firms that when they hear the word that you want to work remotely, will just cut you off and not having anything to do with you. The reason to say again, when you go back to these, can you do the job?
The job means if you go back to these four reasons for law firms, when they're interviewing you, can you do the [00:02:00] job does mean working in an office. If that's what the law firm is all about, then they definitely expect you in the office. Do you want the job means, do you want to work in an office?
And then will you do the job long term? If you ask about remote work and then they're hiring you for an office job, the odds are, you're not going to stick around. So if you start talking about remote work, you're going to on this call, fire yourself. Now, because of this question is so important to people and to law firms, I do believe that people should know the answer to it. And I'm going to actually survey all the firms in the country with this particular question and ask them. And so providing it to our candidates, whether or not they allow people to work remotely and they plan on doing so in the long term, because I think it's important.
