Top 50 Biglaw Firm Won't Reopen Its U.S. Offices Until February 2022
The Delta variant has really thrown a wrench into this firm's plans.
Biglaw firms were once so hopeful that they’d be able to launch full-scale office reopenings this year. Welcoming lawyers and staff back to the office in September was the goal for many firms. Some were able to make it happen, but many others decided to delay their proposed reopenings until October. Now, with October less than a month away, several firms have opted to call 2021 a loss, aiming to get back into the office in early 2022.
That’s what’s happening at West Coast mainstay Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. The firm has now set the latest 2022 reopening date of any law firm yet.
The firm originally planned to reopen its U.S. offices on September 20, complete with full services and amenities. Although all of the firm’s offices would be open, no one would actually be required to return in 2021; a physical presence in a WSGR office would be completely voluntary. Then, COVID-19’s Delta variant quickly trashed those carefully laid plans, leading the firm to announce that its full reopening would instead take place on October 25, with a new requirement that anyone hoping to return to the office would have to be fully vaccinated. With vaccine hesitancy and COVID infections still running high, the firm has decided to postpone its full reopening to February 1, 2022.
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Doug Clark, Wilson Sonsini’s managing partner, sent out a firmwide memo (available in full on the next page) yesterday afternoon detailing the latest plans:
The reasons for postponing the October re-opening date are straightforward. We remain in a volatile situation in many of our U.S. locations, in terms of COVID-19 transmission due to the Delta variant. We also remain subject to various restrictive regulations and guidance concerning COVID safety protocols, including masking, social distancing, and remedial measures in the event of infections. It is an unfortunate landscape, but the best thing we can do is to continue to focus on the health of our firm community and support virtual work. Our offices remain available, of course, to those who need to access them in order to serve our clients most effectively.
Why February 1? While it remains theoretically possible that we could reopen sooner than that, we wanted to give people stability and predictability as to our timing through the holiday season. In addition, we wanted to align the reopening of offices with the task of implementing measures arising from the work of the Office of the Future Task Force….
What, exactly, has the firm’s Office of the Future Task Force been working on? Some new measures WSGR employees can look forward to seeing include the implementation of “hoteling in a thoughtful way” and working with attorneys and staff to “identify[] local norms that may influence the frequency of office attendance.” Next week, the firm’s “Project Hybrid” will be discussed.
It certainly sounds like a lot of innovative work has been going on behind the scenes at Wilson Sonsini to create the Biglaw workplace of the future. Attorneys and staff will have to wait until next year to see what their new hybrid office life looks like.
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(Flip to the next page to read the full memo from Wilson Sonsini.)
What has your firm announced as far as a reopening plan is concerned? The more information is out there, the more likely it is that firms will be able to establish a market standard for a return to work.
As soon as you find out about the reopening plan at your firm, please email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Office Reopening”) or text us at (646) 820-8477. We always keep our sources on stories anonymous. There’s no need to send a memo (if one exists) using your firm email account; your personal email account is fine. If a memo has been circulated, please be sure to include it as proof; we like to post complete memos as a service to our readers. You can take a photo of the memo and attach as a picture if you are worried about metadata in a PDF or Word file. Thanks.
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.
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