The law of design

It’s a well known fact that lawyers have enclosed offices, coal fires in Georgian waiting rooms and that they have little use for architects or, worse still, space planners and interior designers.

But times are changing and not only do successful firms give considerable thought to image, as presented through their corporate literature and the style of their now very business-like front reception areas, but they understand the importance of office space in facilitating or hindering the daily effectiveness of their business.  Thus architecture is now a subject for legitimate partner discussion and not just something to be idly looked at when flipping the pages of Country Life.

To introduce an article about office design and the law in such a way would be facetious if it were not for the fact that only 10 years ago computers were a rarity in most legal firms and their potential impact being ignored.  Now, however, their ubiquitous presence characterises just one way in which the wind of change has blown as fiercely through the legal profession as it has through any other business - and that to equate the word “business” with “profession” is not being sloppy in one’s terminology but recognising that the principles of growth and change, customer awareness, cost of overheads and accommodation of technology all relate to the operation of a legal firm as much as they do to any other business.

“Image” is a relatively easy concept to absorb in making the psychological step from “profession” to “business”, so also “cost of overheads” or “accommodation of technology”.  Less easy in thinking outside the legal box is the idea that the arrangement of space overall has an effect on the practice of the profession.  Yet it is in understanding this and in feeling able to re-think the bones of the organisation itself that the most effective steps can be taken in improving business performance.

The story starts with those same computers which have made their insidious way into the office and which seemed irrelevant to much of the legal profession such a little time ago.  In immediate physical terms computers have rendered inadequate traditional furniture which now needs to accommodate technology and paper.  In addition cables make rooms untidy and even unsafe and heat and noise have eroded the former elegance of traditional “chambers”.  However it is in their logistical impact on the life of the office rather than in simple physical terms that computers have most importantly changed the scene.  It is what technology now allows professionals to do, rather than in what it is, that a sea change has occurred in the working environment. The concept has been much publicised and is generally accepted, but quite how it impacts on office design and the design of lawyers’ offices in particular has not yet been fully assimilated.

The production and exchange of information is accelerating and this is having an effect on the traditional roles of persons within organisations as well as the physical space they might occupy.  This in turn is affecting the general arrangement of office space and hence buildings, and for the major practices traditional office locations, such as Charlotte Square in Edinburgh, have all but disappeared.  In only the last few years the size of the major practices has doubled and trebled and new buildings and locations are not just acceptable but considered key to business development. Changes have occurred in the services being delivered by many law firms and the perception of what the firm consists of has changed in both the eyes of the public and the practices themselves. In general the practice of the law has become more responsive to business needs, and with this has come a change in attitude and expectation on the part of staff.  Which is the chicken and which is the egg in this relationship between organisations and the space they occupy is at the end of the day unimportant.  What is significant is that a relationship exists and that the two issues require to be thought through together.  Thus the facilities management issues, not to say overall management issues, faced by legal practices today are considerably more complex than they used to be and deserve professional consideration.

While there are similarities in the trends being experienced by organisations today there are, of course, differences and legal practices have some particular issues which require understanding in re-thinking the office environment - most notably the need for confidentiality and the ability to concentrate. It is these characteristics that have led in the past to the pattern of enclosed offices. While the need for confidentiality and lack of disturbance persist (as indeed they do in many other organisations other than law firms) some other characteristics (which have gone hand in hand with the nature of the traditional office) appear to be changing.  Thus there appears to be less opportunity for most types of lawyer to operate in isolation - almost as separate businesses - and more need to become part of a team.  This latter means more need for meetings, more need to exchange information formally and informally, more need to have the kind of back-up which is not just administrative or in the form of dutiful trainees. In the profession’s ardent defence of the enclosed office therefore one is forced to ask how much is necessary and how much is merely comfortable and the excuse for certain bad habits.

But before the office design debate sinks into a defence of enclosed offices versus open plan, it is worth recognising that enclosed offices are not illegal (!) and in between these two extremes lie all sorts of variations of open and enclosed space and the opportunity to expend design ingenuity.  The debate requires therefore to be about how to rethink the needs of the legal profession in the light of additional business pressures, not some campaign to turn lawyers into call centre operators or account managers in a design agency.

It is in bigger organisations of course that the need to rethink the situation becomes most obvious. It is bigger organisations, possibly located in more expensive inner city areas, that the cost of overheads can become crippling and the need for change increases.  With an organisation of (say) 20 people the separation of “front of house” client space from “back of house” office space is hardly necessary and the need for privacy easily solved with the provision of a few offices.  The proliferation of enclosed offices in a large organisation however becomes almost a contradiction in terms - apparently one organisation, attempting to benefit by being in a single location with shared overheads, but breaking down in effect into a series of self-contained departments competing for limited resources. Large organisations need to rethink the process of communication, their approach towards clients, information and data retrieval processes - all things which are handled almost subconsciously in small organisations. It is in large organisations therefore that facilities management requires to become institutionalised and a formal and constant auditing of facilities is necessary, if the use of space, furniture, energy consumption is not to get rapidly out of hand.

It is in both large and small organisations however that certain less quantifiable aspects of the modern office are becoming important; best expressed in what one might call the ‘style’ of the organisations - the use of easily available information, the need to respond to client demands, the need to interact with others.

Changes in the office style are being driven by the increase in IT, which, as has been noted, makes technical demands on the physical environment. Ironically, however, as IT becomes ever more pervasive, so are the pressures on the physical environment likely to reduce, since changes in equipment design are rendering it increasingly benign. In all organisations, however, as a result of IT, management structures are tending to change - hierarchies are becoming flatter, discipline more important. In such situations a working environment which at least permits flexibility and possibly even stimulates a positive attitude to work can pay dividends.  We have moved here beyond the need to impress clients or the need to make the office more comfortable or even efficient.  Nor, in drawing attention to the importance of the office environment is one necessarily talking about expensive finishes or costly systems of environmental control.  One is, however, drawing attention to the inextricable link between management and the physical area in which the politics of the office are meted out; how the structure of the working environment creates attitudes which can be positive or negative in generating people’s response to change and the nature of work.

How one creates a stimulating working environment is a subject more suitably developed within the pages of a design magazine, but the fact that design matters, and matters increasingly to forward thinking organisations of all sorts, and merits the use of proper professional support, is what is important for hard pressed managing partners to appreciate at this stage.

Hugh Anderson, Hugh Anderson Associates