It’s wild what a distinction 5 years makes. In, say, 2019 (notably pre-Covid), when you stated the brand new Biglaw development was 4 days within the workplace I’d suppose work/life stability was lastly having its second and corporations had been truly making progress to forestall burnout. However it’s 2025, and requiring 4 days of workplace face time is a stricter requirement than most agency legal professionals have grown accustomed to during the last 5 years.
4 days within the workplace is certainly the brand new development. The newest agency to announce 4 days is Duane Morris, a agency with $694,188,000 in gross income final yr making it 82nd on the Am Regulation 200 rating. Earlier this week, the agency introduced that, after Labor Day, they’ll need to be again within the workplace Monday by way of Thursday.
Learn the complete memo beneath.
Duane Morris isn’t the one agency on the four-day-a-week prepare Covington; Davis Polk; Latham; Paul Weiss; Ropes & Grey; Simpson Thacher; Skadden; Vinson & Elkins; Weil Gotshal; WilmerHale; White & Case; Sidley; Hogan Lovells; and A&O Shearman can have a four-day, in-person attendance coverage — and Sullivan & Cromwell has taken its attendance coverage one step additional, requiring attorneys to work from the workplace 5 days every week.
As quickly as you discover out about workplace attendance plans at your agency, please e-mail us (Opens in a brand new window) (topic line: “[Firm Name] Workplace Reopening”) or textual content us at (646) 820-8477. We at all times maintain our sources on tales nameless. There’s no have to ship a memo (if one exists) utilizing your agency e-mail account; your private e-mail account is ok. If a memo has been circulated, please remember to embrace it as proof; we prefer to put up full memos as a service to our readers. You possibly can take a photograph of the memo and connect as an image in case you are frightened about metadata in a PDF or Phrase file. Thanks.
