DECEMBER 2022CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8CIO InsightsCXO InsightsIn My ViewTECHNOLOGY'S NEW AND CRITICAL ROLE IN A POST-COVID WORLD know the timing isn't great," explained Stephen Wood, the managing partner of our Salt Lake City office, "but our lease is up."To say the pandemic has changed the world is a tiresome trope. Traffic, travel and technology have all been altered by Covid-19. Dense traffic and brown smog have given way to fast-moving traffic and crystal-clear skies in Southern California where my firm is based. Empty TSA security checkpoints serve as a stark reminder that airlines are desperate to return to profitability. And video conferencing, once an exotic (if a little nerdy) way to conduct business, is now the norm for professional service firms. Even middle school-aged children now complain of "Zoom fatigue." In fact, the rapid adoption of video conferencing technology combined with expansive work-from-home ("WFH") policies has even led to the rise of so-called "Zoom Towns" vaguely reminiscent of the California Gold Rush. Manhattan and San Francisco are witnessing its inhabitants flee to outlying regions as tech giants like Facebook and Twitter extend their WFH perhaps in perpetuity. Obviously, not every business can operate on a WFH model. But for those that do, life may never look the same. Even before the pandemic, professional service firms (like law firms) started to grapple with the fact that important shifts in workflows (facilitated by technology) may have led to an accumulation of excess square footage. That's why I jumped at the chance to help reimagine our office space when I got Stephen's call. A central challenge of the project is to compress an existing 7,000 sq. ft. office into 3,000 sq. ft. I knew technology would have to play an essential role. But the culture around real estate had to change, too. I knew Stephen was committed to making sweeping changes when he told me, "No one will have a dedicated office in the new space -- not even me." It was certainly bold. Not only would the technology need to help our professionals adapt to a smaller space, we would need to make convincing cultural shifts in the way lawyers thought about office space. The days of the massive corner office as a status symbol had long ago given way to cubicle farms. The challenge was to layer in a combination of simple but practical technology to make the space work for everyone. Luckily, many of those changes had already begun to take place on an ad hoc basis even before the pandemic struck. Over the summer of 2019, I visited several of our firm's larger offices. As I strolled the hallways, it struck me that many private offices on the window line were empty. To be sure, our attorneys are a busy lot and while they weren't sitting at their desks, I knew they were out taking depositions, arguing motions in front of trial judges or prospecting for new clients at lunch meetings. Still, those offices stood empty. That's because law firms had long ago benefited from an infusion of technology which enabled knowledge workers to work remotely. The truth is they had to work remotely: our clients told the legal industry for decades that they didn't care where work got done -- just that it got done. And, at least up until Covid, our attorneys were constantly on the road. They had to be equipped with technology that enabled them to travel and be productive. The problem was office space designs lagged behind this massive shift. The result was an abundance of unused office space.Still, I couldn't wait to put into practice some of the ideas I had collected over the course of my more than 30 year career helping law firms use technology. Lawyers are inherently a conservative bunch. It makes sense that this would be the case. Attorneys spend their time helping their clients avoid (or manage) risk. But, this risk aversion made large law firms slow to embrace the seismic shift from on-premise technology to cloud services. In part, clients' security restrictions impeded the rapid adoption of cloud services. But, as law firms and their clients alike understood how difficult it was to achieve the same operational efficiency of large cloud service providers like Google, Amazon or Microsoft, they were forced to adapt. Luckily, this change was well underway by the time Covid challenged law firm "IJOHN STAMBELOS, CIO, QUINN EMANUEL URQUHART & SULLIVAN, LLPJohn Stambelos
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