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Looking for Law Firm Safety Precautions?

By Anonymous Lawyer (Jeremy Blachman)

I mentioned in yesterday's post the loss of my partners-only bathroom -- that's important, but clearly it's only one of the reasons why working from home is unsustainable in the long run.  We can't maintain an industry that thrives on hierarchical status distinctions when the only opportunities we have to distinguish ourselves are in the different backgrounds behind us during Zoom calls.  We banned artificial backgrounds as a firm-wide rule -- some garbage about honesty and integrity as representatives of the legal profession, I think we said, but the real reason was that I need to see the true squalor in which my associates live in order to remind myself how much better I am.  The first thing I did when we moved to remote work, and I realized I would be spending all day on video, is call the landscapers to put in a pond and a touch of mature forest right outside my window.  We've got benches now, a gazebo, one of those trained dolphins who pops out of the water every so often, a botanical garden worth of flowers (literally -- I scavenged the assets of a broke botanical garden at a bankruptcy auction just to truck it all over to my backyard and replant it within view of my desktop webcam) and a guy I'm paying to wander around and keep it all looking clean.  I haven't actually been outside to see any of it -- I hate nature, I just can't stand anything about it -- but it looks amazing on screen, and that's all that matters.  When I see the bare, empty walls of my associates' apartments, the bookshelves filled with novels they'll never have time to read, the IKEA tables they could afford to replace but why bother when you're hardly home... well, it just makes me smile inside.  And I think the dolphin's having fun, too -- I can see it in his eyes.

But there's only so much landscaping one can do, no matter how competitive, and so we have to end up back in the office eventually.  And it's clear from everything my news compilation service is sending me that we're going to have to make some changes.  We really will have to crack down on elevator usage, first of all.  When we say partners only, it's going to be out of a public health need to de-densify, not just an impulse to make things difficult.  And maybe it's better that way.  I can tell that quarantine has added quite a few pounds to a lot of my colleagues.  There's nothing like a walk up to the 37th floor to start shedding that weight.  We're not going to be able to put out those bagel platters, either.  We used to average about 25% of personnel taking a bagel on any given day, and that's how we managed our ordering.  Now, everyone will have a box delivered to their desk each morning with their allotment -- a quarter of a bagel, half an ounce of cream cheese, and one red onion string.  No beverage, because we really have to limit bathroom use.  In fact, we're seriously considering turning the bathrooms into extra office space and telling people that for safety reasons they can only go at home.  It'll save lots of wasted productivity time, too.  A win-win.

As we float the idea of reopening the office, we've definitely been getting pushback from the weak and infirm.  We've started a group for them to voice their concerns, called Weak and Infirm Lawyers.  We'll collect their comments and consider them at our next partner meeting, just like we do with all of the groups we've formed -- Parent Lawyers, Short Lawyers, Old Lawyers, Dead Lawyers.  Collectively, they've managed to get us to lower the height of our closet shelves, allow an emergency family leave half-day per employee-in-good-standing per year, and arrange for free transportation from the office to the morgue if you happen to die at work.  We used to bill families for the ride, and I have to admit, it was not always easy to collect, and we felt bad going after people's property to cover it, even though we absolutely had the legal right to, we made sure in every employment contract.

We're also planning to ban singing from the office, which is a HUGE RELIEF and something we should have done decades ago, especially once a group of employees started their horrendous a capella group, "Bankrupt of Melody."  And we can't share supplies, which is great, because people always used to steal my stapler, and obviously that was and will continue to be a fireable offense.

Oh, shoot.  I think the dolphin just died.  I guess I'll just have to get the gardener man to perform the tricks until we can replace it.  Ugh, this pandemic.

Updated to add: Subscribe to Anonymous Lawyer's revival at https://jeremyblachman.substack.com/

Full post as published by Anonymous Attorney on July 21, 2020 (boomark / email).