Vancouver law firms stick to traditional office spaces: report

While many industries have adapted to hybrid work arrangements by eliminating single-employee workstations and investing in communal spaces, some Vancouver law firms are sticking to traditional official layouts to attract talent.

That’s according to Dan Boram, chief executive officer of AURA. A recent report by the Vancouver design firm found that 100 percent of its respondents – 14 managing partners from law firms with Vancouver offices – retain traditional office layouts with private offices for lawyers. Each firm employs between 34 and 2,000 employees and responded to AURA between November 2023 and November 2024.

Vancouver firms “have really stuck with a very traditional approach, where you’ve got dedicated private offices that are largely on the perimeter of the space, and you’ve got admin staff in the center with less access to natural light,” Boram says.

“I would have expected COVID and the ability to work hybrid now to have had a greater impact on law firms than we’ve seen,” Boram adds. “A lot of them have hung onto how they work more than we were expecting.”

According to these firms, a key reason for maintaining a traditional office space is to attract and retain talent. Many associates want an assigned, private space to focus on their work, where they don’t have to pack up their documents and equipment at the end of the day, Boram says. While many of the firms AURA has talked to in Europe and Australia have adopted an open plan model that gives lawyers access to desks and private rooms that can be booked for blocks of time, lawyers at the surveyed firms in Vancouver expect a permanently assigned space – even if they’re only in the office a few days a week.

When offices began to reopen following the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies continued to allow employees to work remotely or on a hybrid schedule. In some industries, this decline in in-person work led companies to downsize or even close their office spaces, while others negotiated shorter leases to see how office use would shake out.

Most of the respondents to AURA’s survey did the opposite. While 14 percent of respondents said they were either pursuing or considering shorter lease terms, anticipating a decrease in how much space they need, 86 percent of the firms said they were still committed to long-term leases.

The results surprised Boram, who expected law firms to shy away from making decisions on long-term planning post-pandemic. He says these firms “remained fairly confident in the fact that they will hold dedicated space for their lawyers, and they're making that commitment long term to new space without a whole lot of hesitation.”

In contrast, many companies in the tech sector, for example, “are making very short-term commitments because they're still trying to figure out where the talent’s expectations are going to go,” Boram says.

However, the respondents to AURA’s survey were open to some changes. Fifty percent of the firms reported standardizing office sizes for all lawyers and senior staff, while another 21 percent have considered standardizing their offices.

The remaining 29 percent had no plans to standardize office sizes. While these firms cited space constraints or operational needs as barriers to eliminating differentiated office sizes, Boram says maintaining such differences can harken back to a less modern approach to firm design.

“Forty years ago at a law firm, partners would have bigger offices than junior partners, and then associates would have a smaller office. It was very hierarchical,” Boram says. “What's happening now is looking at an equitable way of how people work. You're seeing people get away from having to have bigger offices.”