Monday My Two Cents: Trust – An Important Hurdle Attorney’s Must Achieve in Remote Work Lifestyle.

As COVID is becoming more manageable and people are trickling back to the brick-and-mortar office, the question will be what will become of the “remote-work” lifestyle?  The Wall Street Journal recently reported that employers don’t trust their employees to work remotely.  Employers fear that it will produce a lack of drive, creativity, and production from their staff.  The data says otherwise.  But how does this translate into the legal profession?

Most of our work can be performed remotely.  “Documents” can be digitized to the “cloud” for electronic consumption on our computers.  “Documents” can be created, manipulated, and filed with many courts on computers, laptops, tablets, and even smart phones.  Your employees need to have a computer, internet, and security measures. But it is still not a one-size-fits-all situation.

You can have your secretary, paralegal, or associate log into the firm’s cloud or server to retrieve, edit, and store files with little fear.  But what about the contract attorneys doing document reviews.  Is your firm ready for this kind of access?  Does the “document review” company offer a secure portal for the pool of attorneys it provides to help with your mass document review project in a remote environment?  Lastly, for the small and solo practitioner, you have to alleviate your potential client and client’s fears that just because you are working remotely, the work will be timely, accurate, and of good quality (all the while beating back the sounds of dogs barking, kids interrupting, and the neighbor’s noisy house project).  (The benefits of remote work to the employer are both undeniable and plentiful – savings in physical office space, insurance, furniture, etc.)  The key to a successful “remote-work” lifestyle is trust.

You have to trust your employee, whether it’s the firm trusting the associate or the client trusting the solo practitioner.  I am not saying you should blindly trust someone (and I am not saying the “remote-work” lifestyle is for every business).  You need to ensure that the employee has the tools to do his/her work in an environment that is safe and productive.  From there, it is the employee’s responsibility to show his/her employer that he/she is dependable, reliable, and trustworthy.  Trust is something you convey to who you hire that then the employee must continue to earn.  In the end, it first comes down to you – do you trust that you made the right choice in who you hired? If you don’t trust your employee, it does not matter where their butt is seated!

MTC.