LSAG Legal Briefs - Vol 2

working. They have friends in tech. In consulting. In advocacy. And whereas in-house legal work used to be reserved for attorneys with at least five years of litigation experience at a firm, this norm no longer applies for many major corporations. As CVS General Counsel Thomas Moriarty notes, “that trend I do believe is shifting. So it is now very possible to come in as a first year into a large corporate legal department.” So while summer associates have traditionally been likely hires, nothing is guaranteed, and the drain of early career associates going in-house is starting even sooner. What this means is that law firms can no longer take the workplace experiences of their young associates for granted. If the investments made in associate hires is to pay off, firms must regard the spaces in which they work with the same attention as those of partners and other permanent staff. Fried Frank, with the recent renovations to its DC office, provides a bold example of how to make this forward-thinking design happen. Facing space constraints with a large amount of incoming summer associates, Fried Frank set out to create a tight-knit team among the new class. Rather than Rather than breaking them up into whichever workstations and offices were free, they instead created an associate “Neighborhood.”

Photo Credit: © 2019 Gensler

small touchdown

meet

workspace

gaming

private

coffee / tea station

CUSHMAN & WAKEFIELD | 9