Biglaw

Top 10 Biglaw Firm Announces 4-Day In-Office Attendance Mandate

This is the same firm that killed the five-day, in-office workweek not so long ago.

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Open notebook with “Today … back to office” text.About two years ago, Above the Law praised Ropes & Gray for officially putting an end to the five-day, in-office workweek for associates. Now, the firm is mandating that associates spend four days in the office each week, making it the latest elite firm to foist this unenviable requirement upon its attorneys.

According to a firmwide memo sent by chair Julie Jones and managing partner David Djaha, starting on November 6, the top 10 Am Law firm will ask that all associates come into the office on Monday through Thursday each week. Here’s an excerpt from the memo (available on the next page):

We are making this change because success in this highly competitive marketplace requires us to invest in what makes Ropes & Gray extraordinary—our culture, teamwork in furtherance of excellence for clients and our steadfast commitment to developing the best lawyers in the world. These strengths, which define and differentiate us, can only be realized to their fullest extent through in-person collaboration, learning and mentoring. Simply put, we need more people together, more often, more consistently.

Ropes is now the fourth major firm to require that attorneys spend four days working from the office each week. Skadden came first, followed by Davis Polk, and Weil Gotshal. We can’t imagine associates at the firm are happy about this. As previously noted by Kate Reder Sheikh, a partner in the associate practice group of legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa, associates have had a “very strong, negative reaction” to the four-day, in-office work mandate. On the bright side, the office attendance requirement at Ropes doesn’t begin until November; Skadden, Davis Polk, and Weil will begin requiring associates to work four days in the office come September.

Thankfully, Ropes recognizes that associates’ lives — ranging from health care appointments to child-related issues — still exist outside of the office, and is allowing for some flexibility within its new office attendance mandate. “We respect your judgment as professionals on work location when these situations arise. As a guideline, our experience suggests that these occasional circumstances have tended to arise in a range of 10-20 days per year. When these events come up, please let your teams know,” Jones and Djaha state in the memo.

The firm is still offering several weeks’ worth of optional remote time for associates, including the week of Thanksgiving, and the week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. Perhaps as a mea culpa of sorts for its new attendance policy, Ropes has also decided to include the last two weeks of August as part of its bank of remote weeks.

In closing the memo, Jones and Djaha write, “While we know our new in-office schedule will be an adjustment for some, we are confident this step is needed to ensure our firm’s long-term success.”

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Best of luck to associates at Ropes & Gray as they adjust to their new lives, which will be mostly spent at the office.

(Flip to the next page to read the Ropes & Gray memo in full.)

As soon as you find out about office attendance plans at your firm, please email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Office Reopening”) or text us at (646) 820-8477. We always keep our sources on stories anonymous. There’s no need to send a memo (if one exists) using your firm email account; your personal email account is fine. If a memo has been circulated, please be sure to include it as proof; we like to post complete memos as a service to our readers. You can take a photo of the memo and attach as a picture if you are worried about metadata in a PDF or Word file. Thanks.

Ropes & Gray Latest Firm to Move to Four Days a Week In-Office [Bloomberg Law]
Ropes Is Latest Law Firm to Require Lawyers to Work Four Days a Week in Office [American Lawyer]

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Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter and Threads or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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