In its 2024 roundtable discussion, Law Week Colorado spoke with Holland & Hart partner and firm chair Chris Balch, Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani partner Franz Hardy, Haynes Boone Denver office managing partner Dan Malone, Fairfield and Woods managing director Jack Reutzel and The W Law partner Emily Warren.
2024 roundtable participants discussed remote work and hybrid office arrangements, and the difficult balance to strike between allowing for flexibility in remote work and implementing an equitable policy that doesn’t alienate non-attorney staff. The partners noted the unique challenge and opportunity artificial intelligence presents to the legal industry. Some firms have reported adapting or investigating the technology for use in practice work while others have policies in place that limit the use of AI systems to only specific kinds of tasks or for specific non-attorney roles.
The transcript below has been edited for clarity and length.
REUTZEL: So I’ve got an initial question that we continue to struggle with, and I’d be really interested, because, Emily, you’re a smaller shop, and everybody else is bigger than me. This idea of hybrid workforce and back to office. You know, we’ve been kicking this around here for years, ever since we’ve come out of COVID, and we feel like we are in a pretty good shape or hybrid.
WARREN: Why don’t you tell us how you’re navigating it first? Since you said, it sounds like you guys are pretty stable with your hybrid setup.
REUTZEL: We are totally hybrid. We don’t require any attorneys to be in any given amount of days. We do have requirements for staff to be in at least twice a week. This is for some continuity there, [but] there are exceptions. It’s actually worked pretty well, but I do feel like there’s some — not resentment — but out of sight, out of mind, for those attorneys that aren’t here every day. We’re always trying to guard against feeling a little bit weird about that.
BALCH: I’ll jump in real quick. So post-COVID, we’ve taken a flexible, hybrid approach. We are asking our people, I think like a number of firms, to be in the office at least three days a week. We’re not mandating specific days, but we’re asking teams of people to work together and coordinate and try to get in and be present. When you’ve got an apprenticeship model like we have, that in person training and mentorship and adherence to professional development is critical.
MALONE: I’ll echo what Chris just said. We’re glad to set policy here for Denver. We have two or three days in the office. We’re starting to see more of a four-day workweek in New York. We’ve got about 160 lawyers in New York that want to come in. Clients are mandating it, and we do a lot of work with [a major financial services company]. [They] wanted their people in five days a week. And so the teams that were servicing our clients had to react to that.
WARREN: We don’t have very many policies in our office. When it comes to remote work, we’d really like people in the office two to three days a week, for the same reasons that everybody’s talked about. But you know, there’s some people who I really wish they enjoyed working from the office more. We allow people to bring their dogs if they have well-behaved, polite dogs — that seems to help. I’m curious, Jack, to hear, since you don’t have any, we have this sort of tension between the staff members and the attorneys when they feel as though attorneys get special treatment — like they don’t have any kind of a policy for remote work, versus the staff members who are required to be there two days a week. I’m curious to hear if that’s a problem. I mean, don’t get me wrong, lawyers are different from staff members in many, many respects. They have a lot more final say so and authority and responsibility. But still, I’m just curious to hear how that looks, because that’s a problem for us sometimes.
REUTZEL: Yeah, I think there’s problems from time to time on that. What has happened through my incredibly effective laissez-faire approach to all this, is that when the staff is in a couple days a week, the lawyers who work with that staff figure out the days that they’re in and they sort of migrate in. So without us invoking a hard and fast policy, most of our lawyers are in three to four days a week, and they coincide with the time that their staff is here. It varies by department too, but people have figured it out without us saying ‘you must do this.’
WARREN: Do you have clients who come in? I have so few clients who physically come to the office.
BALCH: I would say client interaction is only getting better, although it just depends. I think some clients … they want you there in person. We have some of those. But I think client interaction is only increasing in terms of wanting to be physically present.
MALONE: [Clients] have appreciated using boardrooms and fancy meeting spaces with full-service staff. So, Emily, in answer to your question, we try to hold meetings in the office. We try to have lunches in the office. Clients, once they’ve seen the space, if they’re coming in from east coast, west coast, Texas, they want to use the space as kind of a central meeting space if deal teams are located around the country. And so it’s been a nice asset to us to have such a great coworking space for not just our attorneys, but also our clients that are coming through Denver.
BALCH: Do we want to hit the broad [question] with what challenges and opportunities we’ve all been experiencing over the past six months to a year? I’d say recruiting and retention is always a challenge, but it’s an opportunity. After 2022 which was just historic in terms of the demand level and the great resignation all at the same time and new entrants into a lot of our markets, we just had to be more disciplined, more intentional and thoughtful. Everything from the easy stuff like comp [to] what are some of the intangibles you can offer young talent? The younger generations are looking for more, and that’s been something that we’ve really tried to implement some new programming and measures to ensure that our people feel valued and supported. And then technology and innovation, and we can spend some time on that. I think I’d love to hear from you all on what you’re doing with the AI front. We’re doing quite a bit, but technology and innovation, I just think that’s going to be a sweeping change.
HARDY: Can you guys hear me now? Well, maybe apropos to the things we were talking about working remotely, I’ve learned to have like three backup plans to every Zoom meeting, and I’m on number three, so I apologize.
REUTZEL: No worries. We’re glad you’re back. So we were talking about opportunities and challenges that you’re seeing in your place right now.
HARDY: One of the items I see on the horizon is how do you navigate this new work environment of having efficient office space, but not too much office space. And is it enough to just have hoteling, or is that not inviting enough to have that collaboration and professional development that you’re really looking for in our trade.
WARREN: Too much office space is always a question for me. We actually did a small build-out recently. We really can’t build out any further, the way our building is, and I’m delighted by that, because 17 people is unwieldy. I mean, it’s wieldy, but it’s getting on the edge of unwieldy for just two of us who are making all the management decisions. But I can’t even begin to imagine what some of you all have had to deal with.
MALONE: Behind talent, it’s the next biggest expense on the line, right? You pay for your people, then you pay for office space, and whether you’re managing one office or however many offices, making the space as efficient as possible by maximizing every square foot really helps the bottom line. I’d also echo with Chris — it’s still a talent war, but I think it always will be. But I think comp is driving a lot of that market. I think it’s important to have ties to clients to provide value across multidisciplinary practices, as opposed to just a siloed attorney that’s doing that work to help with retention.
REUTZEL: Yeah, that’s something that we’re dealing with, with recruitment and retention. We’re a medium-sized law firm. We’ve been a medium-sized law firm for 90 years. I don’t think we’re ever not going to be a medium-sized law firm. So we can’t compete with the national firms in terms of salary, but we also try to market ourselves as the lifestyle firm, where our hourly minimums or goals are less than the national firm, but we pay less, right? And it’s not always unsuccessful, but it’s a hard sell for these folks to understand, because they say they want a life — the younger folks have a different mindset and work ethic, not that it’s bad, but different. They still want that number, but they’re intrigued by the lesser hours. It’s constantly us trying to show them we’ve built in some objectivity in our bonus structure, so if they really want to bill Holland & Hart hours here, we can show them how they make a Holland & Hart salary here. But that’s not something we expect. It’s not something that we pay for until they show us. So that’s been a challenge.
WARREN: Our comp is going to be very different from what you guys do. And it’s different from what a lot of I think divorce firms do. We compensate people based on the work that they do, and it’s actually based on their collections. It’s a percentage of collections. We have a guarantee that we give people because we’d like them to still be able to take a couple weeks off. And if you take a couple weeks off, your compensation could drop dramatically and maybe you can’t make your rent or mortgage payment. We don’t want that to happen, so we do a modest guarantee. It tends to work well.
LAW WEEK: Dan, you mentioned the New York office is doing a 4-day workweek. Are Colorado attorneys asking for that as well and has that been a sustainable office model for New York so far?
MALONE: To clarify, our firmwide policy is still three/two for the attorneys — three days in, two days out. And we don’t have a mandate on those. What we’re seeing more in the New York marketplace, generally, with clients and other firms, is more of a four- to five-day workweek. Davis Polk, I know, one of our peers, is up to five days. They want people in the office. We’re just seeing more of an organic four day a week in Denver. I am a five-day guy, just because I have small children, and this is my safe space where I can focus both on mental sanity and my clients.
LAW WEEK: Generally, about AI and tech in law, a lot of firms have reported being excited about the possibilities of the tech and using it to improve workflows, but few have told us they have specific policies in place to limit or place constraints on its use in practice work. Do any of you have policies in place about AI or would you consider creating one in the next year?
WARREN: We don’t tend to use AI — I am truly fascinated to see what you all are doing. It’s hard for me to envision what value it provides to a lawyer. I figure I can write better than any computer program ever could write so I don’t even know what you’re doing with it.
HARDY: It’s pretty powerful technology. For example, Emily, put in a question on ‘Type me a brief on a motion to dismiss based upon lack of causation on a negligence claim.’ The technology’s there to provide a brief.
WARREN: But it doesn’t know all the facts. It can give you maybe the law, assuming that you set the parameters correctly, but it doesn’t know any of your facts. How do you get that information into it?
HARDY: Maybe it doesn’t know all the facts. So I’m certainly not saying that you could take that and cut and paste it. I guess my point is the technology is more developed, I think, than you can just shake your head at and say it’s not very good, because it is very good. And I think that’s where law firms have to be careful with it, because it can be good enough in certain instances. And we’ve all heard by now the horror stories about people using citations that don’t exist, or those type of things. I think for our firm, that’s where we are right now, are the dangers of artificial intelligence. Where I think we continue to go is how to effectively hone that tool and that resource, which is very powerful and very capable, and use it the right way.
REUTZEL: We do have a policy and we kind of rolled off and leaned into the ethical considerations of using [AI]. There are four or five ethical rules that we pulled out. We drafted a policy around those really to emphasize that it’s still only a tool. But it’s something that shouldn’t be ignored. I mean, I’m not a litigator, but I understand most courts have an AI program that run things through, and they can figure out cases that you should have cited in addition to or in substitution for. So we want to use that as a tool to hone our skills as well, right? All the generative AI tools and software out there has to be vetted by our IT coordinator, and if it’s something that he or she is unfamiliar with, it has to be approved by the executive committee.
BALCH: Yeah, I mean, let’s face it, it’s disruptive, but our position has been we need to keep up with it. Our clients are going to require it, and we’re going to embrace it. As you said, Franz, guardrails are really important. I mean, in the absence of any sort of legislation or regulation around AI yet, we’re all faced with how are we going to use this safely and securely? We do have a firm-wide policy. This year, we have an innovation lab with these nine data scientists and technologists, and they actually developed our own version of OpenAI. We call it Juvo Chat and it meets pretty stringent security standards, and with mandatory training, each of our lawyers can now use it. We’re using it for sort of routine, lower-level tasks. Our business professionals are using it all the time, conducting research. And then we’ve got an AI committee. It’s a pretty big group. I sit on it with our managing partner, and we’re testing all sorts of AI platforms and technology. I think AI is here to stay, so we’re just trying to stay ahead of the curve. I still think it’s got a ways to go, but we’re trying to keep up.
MALONE: I agree. I mean, if you’re not thinking about it or planning for it, I do think you’re behind right now, but we have a policy not to incorporate it into our legal work. We have a whole team of partners and our tech team that rolls this out for the whole firm to use it in certain applications, but not for legal work.
WARREN: We don’t have cases with however many hundreds of thousands of pages. I mean, not generally speaking. Every once in a while there is the off case that is enormous. But even then, it’s not enormous like your cases are enormous. We just don’t have that volume of data. And for what it’s worth, the law around divorce work, custody work, family law in general, it is very sparse and it tends to be state-specific. I’m still just not sure how useful it would be for us.
BALCH: Any significant trends you all are seeing in the business of law? I know that was one of the questions, either as it relates to your firm, or maybe industry-wide, anything that jumps out at you all? I think the one thing that we are starting to see [is] a continued increase in alternative fee arrangements across practice areas. I think our clients, even existing clients, are looking for budget certainty. That’s nothing new. [But] I see that as an increasing trend.
MALONE: The economy always is top of mind, right? We had such a boom after COVID for all practice groups that now interest rates are high. There’s an election coming up. A lot of people, just as Chris said, like certainty in what they’re doing, and we’re seemingly operating in a corporate environment where there’s nothing but uncertainty. And so whether that fuels certain practice groups going forward — our litigation groups, our restructuring groups, have been kind of gangbusters. I don’t know what the next half of the year holds, but I know there’s going to be lots of excitement and fireworks, whatever side equation you’re on.
Editor’s note: this article was updated June 17 to redact a client name from two quotes in the transcript portion.