Return To Office Policies Attempt To Catch Bees With Vinegar

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

Again, we entered. That really didn’t work at all in

Kathryn Rubino:

It. I mean, it’s just a response to you. It doesn’t have to be exactly what you say.

Joe Patrice:

Well, but it’s not a response because I hadn’t actually said,

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, I’m greeting you. Just because don’t greet me first doesn’t mean I can’t greet you.

Joe Patrice:

How about you take over the show?

Kathryn Rubino:

Hey, welcome to another episode of Thinking Like A Lawyer.

Joe Patrice:

Hey, I’m going to interrupt you for no reason just to be a scotch.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, that is a reason, right? So it’s not no reason. So maybe your logic

Joe Patrice:

Theme is

Chris Williams:

Not self-Defeating isn’t the best way to reason.

Kathryn Rubino:

I’m Kathryn Rubino. That’s Joe Patrice and joined by Chris Williams. We are all from Above the Law, and this is Thinking Like A Lawyer, where we talk about the legal stories from the week. That was

Joe Patrice:

Okay. That’s not bad.

Kathryn Rubino:

It’s not terrible. It’s not that hard. What you do, Joe,

Joe Patrice:

What’s that small talk? We’re going to have a little bit of small talk. Okay.

Kathryn Rubino:

Did anybody do anything fun over the last week or so?

Joe Patrice:

No.

Kathryn Rubino:

Wow. Okay. That was okay. We’re just going to end this segment.

Chris Williams:

I saw the live action adaptation of Avatar, the last Airbender,

Joe Patrice:

Oh,

Chris Williams:

On Netflix, and it was interesting.

Joe Patrice:

Did they successfully bend Air?

Chris Williams:

One person did, and there was an

Joe Patrice:

Animal that, that’s the main character, Bob Avatar, right?

Chris Williams:

No, you’re thinking of his older cousin. He died in the genocide. But yeah, so Ang was done. Well, the casting was pretty good for most of the characters. I will say for anybody that watched the show and had King Boonie as one of their favorite characters, prepare for disappointment, they butchered my boy. But other than that, it was nice to see, it was nice to see Iro in the flesh as opposed to, I guess in the pigment or however you would describe a animated character. But it was cool to see.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, I spent some time in Boston over the weekend and it is chilly chili. Chili chili. I kind of living in that false spring kind of mentality where I feel like I should not have to wear a jacket maybe, or a winter coat. I should say. I should wear a jacket. I enjoy a jacket moment. The coat is where you lose me, but it was less, that’s

Chris Williams:

Called global warming.

Joe Patrice:

Well, or in this instance, it wasn’t enough warming for you.

Kathryn Rubino:

It was pretty freaking cold. But as a northern city, I suppose all the buildings I was in were very, very well heated. One may say too well heated. So I was in that awkward position of feeling like, oh, I’ll bust back out the sweaters and then immediately regretting my decision.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, it’s been busy around here. I’ve been running back

Kathryn Rubino:

And forth. That doesn’t sound busy. Just to be clear,

Joe Patrice:

What, yeah, it’s been a very busy time around the Above, the Law universe. I’ve been hopping back and forth to various conferences and stuff like that, so I’ve not really had much time to do anything outside of work. I hope to be able to do that in maybe a week. I will get free. That’s what my calendar’s currently looking like.

Kathryn Rubino:

Fair enough. Well, that wasn’t a very exciting small talk segment, but I guess we’ll take it.

Joe Patrice:

I mean, that’s on you. You’re the one leading the show.

Kathryn Rubino:

Oh, am I officially leading it now? Well then perhaps we should talk about my top story of the week.

Joe Patrice:

Oh, okay. Let’s do that.

Chris Williams:

And also listeners, we just need y’all to share this podcast because if this becomes the best one with Kathryn leading it,

Joe Patrice:

Joe will lose sleep. So please, I could not be happier if that’s

Kathryn Rubino:

What happened. You if you were petty as I am, please,

Joe Patrice:

You could not be happier if that happened. Alright,

Kathryn Rubino:

So last week actually on Friday, so it hasn’t had a ton of time yet on the website, but I think it speaks to a couple of trends in the industry that we’re seeing. We got reports that a top 50 big law firm, Arnold and Porter has decided to crack the whip when it comes to their in-office attendance policy, not the first firm that’s done that apparently at the firm. Their policy is that you have to be in the office 50% of the time, so not on a week by week basis, but sort of overall you have to be in their half of the time. And according to insiders, they found out they did kind of a spot check to see how many attorneys were actually living up to what they were doing, whatever. And they discovered that about 40% of the attorneys were in the office less than 25% of the time.

Joe Patrice:

Oh, so

Kathryn Rubino:

That’s not what they were hoping for. So they decided to, they’re using the technology available to them to make it very clear that you absolutely have to be in the office. So attendance is going to be captured by docking your computer and logging onto the firm wifi rather, and if you’re out of the office for some sort of justified reasons, if you’re on vacation, if you’re at a client’s office, if you’re in court, whatever, you just have to let folks know. But if you do not meet that 50% threshold, then you get emails from your practice chair, office heads, et cetera, and if you have continued issues with your attendance policy, that could include the loss of your remote work options entirely. It can have an impact on your evaluations, promotions in effect, on your bonus, all of those sorts of things. They’ve built in sort of a caveat that if there’s some sort of extenuated circumstances, you can let folks know, but they are serious about being in the office.

Joe Patrice:

I struggle with this a lot. I feel like this is one of those situations that there’s not really a good way of doing this. When you start penalizing people for coming to the office, you’re just alienating them. Many of these people knew that they were highly productive during the pandemic when they weren’t in the office, so why should they have to go back? That said, the next generation is going to only learn by having people around, so you need people to do something. We’ve

Kathryn Rubino:

Written about this as well. There are law firm leaders that have gone on record saying that the associate classes that started during the pandemic or otherwise during fully remote or mostly remote times are not developing as well and as quickly as they would expect. So there is a clear issue that big law is happening. Now, the question of course is whether or not it is a mid-level associate who’s been billing or a senior associate or junior partner who’s been billing, billing, billing. Whether or not it’s their responsibility to train up the sort of next generation of vo because you don’t get evaluated about your ability to sort mentor a first year associate. You get graded sort of at a big law about your ability to bill and if that’s what you’re doing from home, perhaps even more effectively should you go to the office or kind of the counter and probably firm leadership thinks that this is true, that you, part of what your job is also is to train new lawyers to keep because the firm needs that. Right? Big law is very much a kind of a Byrne and churn environment. The people that they hire in any given year, most of them are not going to be there in five years. Very, very few are going to be there in 10. So they need that kind of constant stream of educating and building up new lawyers in order to maintain the quality of their work as a firm overall. So I think it’s kind of a weird position that the firm is putting associates in.

Joe Patrice:

This is not the way to go about this as far as I can tell because there are many other firms that people can easily go to. You don’t want to. The lateral, as you point out, the lateral churn is high enough already. Firms that set themselves up as we are going to take away your money if you aren’t here become, they’re not really good targets for bringing in new laterals and they’re good exit targets for people who are there already. The only way this is going to work is if a firm spends real time trying to think through how to bring people back to the office in an organic and positive incentivized way, having fun things there. It’s cliche, all of these tech companies that are like, instead of giving you a raise, we put in a ping pong table. But there is something to that. The more you can have the office be seen as the sort of place that you want to go, whether there’s events being set up, whether there’s a free cafeteria, whether there’s those kinds of perks aren’t replacements for paying people, but they very much are reasons why somebody might choose to go to the office rather than stay at home.

Kathryn Rubino:

I think another sort of avenue along that line is especially in city environments, your New York offices, not everybody has the space or the setup that is ideal for sitting and doing tremendous amounts of work. I think in investing in multiple different options for setups in the office, whether it’s kneeling chairs, standup desks, those treadmill walk stations, kind of branching out the ways that you can work from the office that are potentially superior to your studio apartment that you maybe share with somebody. I think that making that as desirable as possible is also a way to say, yes, it would be nice to, I know I have to work for 10 hours on this. If I had a great chair, it would make my life better, make my back feel better.

Joe Patrice:

Well, that’s the argument for paying everybody less. Then they can’t afford the one bedroom that’s comfortable to work from home in.

Kathryn Rubino:

So

Joe Patrice:

You want to have them into, well,

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean even if they do have a comfortable environment, having multiple options at a firm I think is a potential way to get people in because some days you might feel like a big cozy chair. Some days you may feel like a kneeling desk. I think having options is awesome and that is a benefit to having a large corporate

Joe Patrice:

Space. I’ve done some office tours even before the pandemic that were starting to lean into the idea of having multiple kinds of collaborative spaces, not just leaning more into conference rooms and stuff like that, but having more in this corner is one of those kind of eggshell couches that looks out over the skyline and over here we have a loungey couch area, whatever, and they were really trying to encourage people to utilize different kinds of spaces for the different needs they have. We are in an era of remote connectivity that you don’t need to be at a desk for somebody to call you. If they need you, they can ping you other ways and if you do that, then maybe there are other ways that you can enjoy your time in the office.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, I mean, what are the advantages that an in office has overworking from home is space. So utilizing that and thinking about that as sort of the difference maker and something that would convince people to go into the office, I think is worth their time and energy.

Joe Patrice:

There’s a bit of a grand irony that the prevalence of online, the ability to do the work online led to firms destroying the gorgeous libraries they used to have, and now the library is exactly the sort of place that I think people might want to have if they were going to go into the office. That’s the kind of place that you do enjoy getting lost into a little nook and cranny and sitting down and doing your work,

Kathryn Rubino:

And I think you’re a hundred percent right that sort of just providing different options and different venues I think will have results for

Joe Patrice:

Folks bring back the libraries. Yeah, that’s the answer. They we’re taking bold stance,

Kathryn Rubino:

Hot take, anti-technology. What are they going to say about this on your technology

Joe Patrice:

Podcast? Well, one, I mean law librarians are very much the tech leaders, so they would love it. No, but as a design element, the library is indicative of the kind of architecture that you want. If you want to be inviting people back, I think that’s going to be our take.

Kathryn Rubino:

I like it.

Chris Williams:

I wonder how often people at doing the PR at the firm is read these emails and cringe because I feel like it’s only a matter of time before one of the firms forcing more in-person attendance becomes a long covid hotbed, and that’s one of the consequences of acting forcing interaction. Like yes, you might have people who are new getting more just touch information, but they’re also touching gers and whatnot, and it’s only a matter of time before something like that happens.

Joe Patrice:

I mean, that time happened. The people who kind of forced folks back when covid was a real serious thing. I’m

Chris Williams:

Talking about long. I don’t know if people were really aware of the effects of long covid back then.

Joe Patrice:

Sure. But I view long covid as something where the Covid was contracted a while ago and it’s just like the continuing effects of it, the new exposure is less likely to be the issue. It’s that you got it sometime before there was a vaccine and now four years later you’re still suffering. But I don’t know though. That’s something that the proximity of workspace deals with.

Chris Williams:

I mean the library

Joe Patrice:

People just

Chris Williams:

Hanging out in the libraries and just having puff chairs and then not wiping down after each other and then,

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, exactly. That’ll be fine. Okay, cool. This is where you take us to a break,

Kathryn Rubino:

Kathryn. Oh, I forgot that I was in charge again.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, see, it’s hard, isn’t it? To keep track of

Kathryn Rubino:

Things. I wouldn’t say that I was just trying to multitask, but we will see you on the other side of this break.

Joe Patrice:

McDermott will and Emory is vault’s number one law firm for associate satisfaction three years running. Why? Because they’re doing big law better. At McDermott, you define what your success looks like, they help you achieve it. Award-winning professional development program and hands-on mentorship propel you toward your goals while the industry leading wellness benefits help you feel your best. So you can do your best. Want to see how your life could be better at McDermott? Head to mw.com/ Above, the Law.

Kathryn Rubino:

Okay, I am apparently still in charge. Then I guess we can talk about one of your favorite repeat topics. Somebody that you have spilled quite a bit of digital ink over. Oh yeah, our good friend and yours. Professor Amy Wax.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, so Amy Wax who rose to prominence in our pages when she started writing op-Eds about how white people are better, so not exactly doing a great job as a scholar.

Kathryn Rubino:

You get credit there for the understatement of that particular,

Joe Patrice:

And I want to clarify this, the argument in her defense always is academic freedom, but it’s a bogus argument, right? Because it’s not as though she’s writing scholarly works about anything here. When she is confronted, when she was confronted by a journalist about backing up the specific, because all she’s writing are op-eds and newspaper letters to the editors kind of stuff. She’s not writing Journal articles and getting peer reviewed or anything like that. She’s spouting off her random thoughts and going on podcasts and when a journalist asked her to provide any evidentiary support for some of the things she was saying, she sent them a Wikipedia site, which not exactly where academic freedom was designed to protect, I don’t really think. So she started doing all that, going to white nationalism conferences and stuff like that, at which point she then started adding, speaking out of turn about her hypothesis that black students at Penn weren’t actually graduating with good grades. To be

Kathryn Rubino:

Clear, she did not present it as a hypothesis. She presented it as well. That’s just true. And only when you realized she actually didn’t have access to the information in order to make that statement of truth or fact that you realized, oh, this is just your racism showing.

Joe Patrice:

Yes. She expanded this to talk about how law school’s worse now that women go to it, and she also then expanded into a discussion that America needs fewer Asians. These,

Chris Williams:

Well, we always had a respect equal opportunity to discriminators.

Joe Patrice:

You know what? She’s got a broad portfolio. Anyway, she then started inviting a known white nationalist recognized hate group representative to campus to just chat with her class. This is the part where it finally got the university to get over their gun shy fear of irritating people who cry academic freedom all the time and do something about it. And they’ve initiated independent report, referred it to the faculty Senate and there was some sort of resolution to that, which she has then appealed and that process is ongoing because of course they weren’t able to do anything about it in a short amount of time. Fast forward, what we just learned, the new development here is we’ve never really known what the faculty Senate hearing Board suggested the punishment be that she felt the need to appeal. So you kind of thought, are they saying she should lose tenure or fire her or something like that? Maybe that’s why she’s appealing this. Actually, all that they did was suggest that she have to her pay be docked by half for a one year, but otherwise she gets to do everything else.

Kathryn Rubino:

This says more about Penn than it does about Amy wax.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, remember Penn was the school that had to where people forced out the president of the university arguing that too woke that they didn’t respect free speech or whatever, and it’s like they clearly don’t care. They’re doing everything they can to keep this person still working there despite look, and you could say that her random op-ed stuff is academic freedom. I don’t think that’s a very good argument considering that there’s no evidence behind it and it’s not peer reviewed or anything like that, but you could argue that’s a professor espousing unorthodox views that should be protected. But at the point she starts attacking the students themselves in there, that is no longer an academic freedom discussion. This now becomes, this is a discrimination in the workplace problem. You as the professor is gone, it is now you as the employee are violating or creating a hostile work environment. I don’t understand why this is taking any time at all. This should have been a firing at least three years ago, if not five,

Kathryn Rubino:

But that seems unlikely to happen given,

Joe Patrice:

So she continues to be a drag on pen.

Chris Williams:

I just know if she gets fired, she’s going to become a congresswoman. That’s generally how the trajectory goes.

Joe Patrice:

Well, she’s not a particularly engaging speaker, so there is that. Yeah,

Chris Williams:

There’s some overlap,

Joe Patrice:

But she is a fundraiser. She still has up a fundraiser for the Amy Wax Legal Defense Fund, which she, on her website claims is a tax deductible donation, which is not how the tax code works. The tax code would not allow you to create a charitable foundation for the benefit of one person. Nonetheless, that is how she advertises it on her site. It’s not

Chris Williams:

Like she’s a teacher of law or anything.

Joe Patrice:

This has, I have written about this, our tax law expert columnist has written about this. This seems like an issue, but no legal entity, law enforcement entity has yet done anything about it. So we’ll

Kathryn Rubino:

See. We’ll see. Alright, well on that happy note, we will take a quick break and see you on the other side and for our last story of today, we’ll turn to the federal judiciary where at least one Republican appointed federal judge has learned that a lifetime appointment means you don’t actually have to count out to Donald Trump anymore. Judge Reggie Walton was appointed by George Bush, well actually both bushes to different positions throughout the course of his career. So very much a Republican judge known for being tough on crime and was sitting and sentencing somebody in one of the January 6th insurrection cases. Somebody pled guilty to two felonies and he was sentencing them to some jail time and took that opportunity to reflect on January 6th and said that the specter of January 6th continues to haunt us and that he’s worried that that continued rhetoric will have a similar impact in 2024 and also specifically called out Donald Trump’s manhood. Yeah, it was a weird turn of phrase I guess, but Walton said that at least Al Gore when he lost the 2000 election was a man about it because he actually conceded defeat as opposed to do all the things that Donald Trump did, which you got to love that burst of honesty there. It was definitely a moment. I’m not sure that that kind of dicta is something you want to be doing all the time, but it was definitely an enjoyable moment, I think for a lot of us paying attention to what was going on.

Chris Williams:

I was always happy to see Donald Trump get caught a sore loser in an actual court opinion.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, yeah. Well, it was not an opinion. It was what he was talking about during the sentencing phase of the case, but was so he said it kind of in court, but I definitely appreciated the way that he was very blunt about his feelings, not just about January 6th, but about sort of the sanctity of the process overall as we inch closer and closer to November of 2024 that a repeat of all the disaster that happened in 2020 and early 2021 looks like it’s going to happen again. So the more folks on the right that are calling that out as problematic, I think overall we’re better off.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. That way it’s good to know that Nikki Haley has another voter that will get her all the way up to 10, I think.

Kathryn Rubino:

Fair

Joe Patrice:

Mean. Yeah. It’s a testament to how broken all of this, and I also think it’s fascinating that, not that anyone has pushed him, nor would he say anything if you did, but the number of folks who are outspoken critics of the problem, people like Bill Barr and stuff like that, whenever anyone gets them on the record, so you are going to vote for Joe Biden in this general election. They’re like, well, no, I’m still good at, they’ll go at home. This is a dangerous threat to democracy, but also I’m going to vote for him

Kathryn Rubino:

Anyway. Well, judge Walton did not comment,

Joe Patrice:

Nor do I think he would or would be appropriate or Right,

Kathryn Rubino:

Right. But it is interesting when you sort of look at the folks on the right that are coming out against sort of the worst parts of the Trump regime this year is going to get interesting. Yeah. Alright, well I think that kind of wraps us up. Thank you everyone for listening. You can find us on your podcast listening service of choice. You can feel free to subscribe and give us the reviews. The stars are great and we’ll take them, but written reviews help us move up the algorithm and help other people find us as a legal podcast. You can find us on the social medias. The website overall is at ATL blog. I’m at Kathryn one. Chris is at writes for Rent. Joe is at Joseph Patrice or Joe Patrice on some of the newer social media endeavors. You can also feel free to check out other offerings from the Legal Talk Network. You can also find me on the Gibo podcast and Joe is on that legal tech journalist round table that he is

Joe Patrice:

Close Enough, so

Kathryn Rubino:

better than you do a lot of the time that he is so fond of talking about and have a good week, y’all.

Continue Reading