The Remote Revolution: Parts One and Two

The Remote Revolution, Part One: Jobs in The Cloud

Virtual employment is not a new concept for Americans, but the once verboten staffing strategy has been increasingly adopted by law firms and legal service providers alike in the last few years. Increases in remote workforces have dramatically altered the balance between quality of life, base and variable compensation, profit sharing, commuter cost, quality of work product, time availability and more for legal technology professionals. This article will take a brief look at the employer and employee advantages and disadvantages as legal jobs, like legal data, “move to the cloud.”

The greatest advantage for employers when building a remote workforce is the decrease in overhead. This includes costs for physical office space, landlines, electricity, heating and air-conditioning and more. While these might seem insignificant, a study by professor Joe Hadzima from MIT calculates roughly “225-250 square feet per employee” for the average American company totaling an estimated $2,000 per employee per year. Meanwhile, in the UK, De Villiers Surveyors found that “the average cost to office occupiers of accommodating a full-time member of staff for a year rose to ￡4,638 ($6,616) per employee.” Regardless of if you are in legal or another vertical, the employer cost to house talent on premise is increasing year over year around the globe. The bottom line: Having remote workers saves money. 

This paradigm holds true for the employee as well. Gasoline, rail and road transport, water, dining out and fashion and apparel bills go down dramatically for the employee who works remotely. Since home can be anywhere, a remote work lifestyle can give families the opportunity to choose their desired climate, where to find better or more schooling options for their children or provide the ability to travel frequently without necessarily taking time off work. Remote employees also often enjoy the flexibility that comes with not commuting into an office, including having more child care options, healthier eating and exercise habits and fewer distractions around the water cooler. All of this leads to another key factor in human capital management: retention. 

Since currently work-from-home models are rare (but increasing) in legal, it is hard for employees used to that lifestyle to find other jobs that will accommodate them. Retention, in turn, increases. Retention is key to cost savings as the expense of hiring a new employee can be up to 30 percent of the new hire’s total compensation, not to mention the often dramatic loss of institutional knowledge and competitive intelligence when experienced employees leave. 

A perhaps unrealized reality for law firms and legal technology vendors is that employees are almost always willing to take a lower base salary in exchange for the ability to work from home. For example, a project manager in e-discovery who may command a $140k base salary is often willing to take a $10-30k pay cut on base compensation for the ability to work from home. In 2015, TRU Staffing Partners found that one in every five candidates seeking new employment was motivated first and foremost by a desire to find a work-from-home opportunity. Two percent of all hires made through TRU in 2015 were remote employees, up from less than 0.25 percent in 2014. 

Employers will generally find that work-from-home employees show greater productivity than in-office workers. First, work-from-home employees have a reduced amount of wasted time commuting and preparing for work. For some, this means an additional two to four hours of available time each day to either work/bill more or rest and relax with family and friends. Employees also spend significantly less money by avoiding a commute, especially in New York City. A recent study published in the Guardian claims that the “average New Yorker’s workweek is 49.1 hours long, not because they are working so much (but) because they spend about six hours a week commuting.” According to Scott Stringer, the New York City comptroller whose data generated the report, “This means employees in the Big Apple get paid less than it appears on an hourly basis, because their commutes are significantly greater than anyone else in the country.” In fact, New Yorkers spend on average two hours more a week commuting than full-time workers in the 29 next largest U.S. cities. Considering TRU Staffing Partners’ annual “State of the e-Discovery Industry” statistics have consistently found that between 45-50 percent of all new hires in e-discovery are in New York, the cost, time and emotional distress that is mitigated by a remote workforce could be a compelling competitive and financial advantage for law firms and vendors centered in the commerce capital of the country. 

Paul Prewitt, director of client services for Contact Discovery Solutions, fervently believes clients have a “24/7 demand for e-discovery support.” Prewitt also explains that it is hard for employers to find talent to cover second or third shifts from the hours of 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. Remote employment is slowly becoming the solution to this problem. With many young parents and millennials now dominating the workforce in non-leadership roles throughout legal, the desire to work these shifts while avoiding commuting time and cost is palpable. Prewitt believes “technology allows for PMs and support staff to both service clients and effectively communicate from virtually anywhere.” Furthermore, Prewitt’s philosophy has always been to “ensure (his) team is made up of the most talented resources available, regardless of proximity to the office.” He professes, “I have proven the work-from-home concept time and again throughout my career by providing seamless project management to clients through distributed workforces covering all time zones in the United States and beyond. This model offers a better quality of life to those providing the services by eliminating their commute and allowing them to maintain a geographic profile that fits their lifestyle.”

All these cost saving lead to the ultimate advantage: increased profit margins for employers. With e-discovery processing and hosting pricing dropping almost 1,000 percent since 2004, law firms and vendors whose profits keep shrinking are wise to find ways to save money. 

As e-discovery providers get bigger and move away from client-centric service models into compartmentalized service delivery (client-centric meaning human capital is fully dedicated to one client versus employees functioning on a task-based execution model regardless of what the client or case may be), remote technical talent becomes viable and often more effective. However, there are certainly many challenges that come with deploying a remote workforce. 

In part two of “The Remote Revolution: Jobs in the Cloud,” we will examine the challenges of a work-from-home model including accountability, technology implementation and selection, security, hiring the right people and defining and maintaining company culture and identity.

The Remote Revolution, Part Two: The Challenges with Virtual Employment

Part one of “The Remote Revolution: Jobs in the Cloud” exposed the advantages to both employer and employee of building a remote workforce or taking a job as a virtual staffer. Reduced overhead cost, increased quality of life, shift flexibility, longer retention and tenure, and removal of geographic hiring constraints are persuasive arguments for remote employment. However, there are clear challenges and disadvantages to remote employment, especially in legal technology, including accountability, technology selection and implementation, security, identifying and hiring the right people, executive buy-in and defining and maintaining company culture.

Remote employment developed a bad reputation in 2013 after Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer instituted a “no work from home” policy for her 12,000 employees, demonstrating that if the person in charge of the company does not subscribe to the philosophy, it won’t work. Before beginning to build a remote team or even hire a remote individual, one of the biggest challenges is getting top-down executive level buy-in to deploy a staffing model that integrates or holistically reinvents a team with work from home employees. Scott Zimmerman, manager of Automated Litigation Support for Haynes and Boone, LLP, and advocate for WFH staffing, notes, “Hiring remote employees is not a decision to be made without thought and calculated planning; it is very different from the way law firms traditionally operate and will require significant change within all levels of your organization.” Managers of litigation support departments, IT and help desk operations and even document review teams are best positioned to get approval for this staffing strategy by first creating an airtight business plan. Additionally, a great strategy for developing attorney trust in remote workers is to allow existing employees the ability to work remotely. Since trust is already established between the lawyer(s) and a proven staff member, integrating remote support through current staff is a great starting point to building buy-in. Zimmerman reiterates, “Trust is the cornerstone and greatest challenge of deploying a successful remote staffing model.”

The primary reason employers, law firm and otherwise, are against a remote workforce is the belief that, unmonitored at home, employees will be off task and distracted more often and thus less productive or effective. Said more simply by Dave Nevogt, founder of Hubstaff time tracking software, dismissal of remote hires “stems from trust issues and a hesitation to deviate from the common/comfortable ways to run a business.” There is a perceived leap of faith that employers feel they are taking by hiring someone to work from home. Unmonitored and remote, however, are not synonymous. Technology has begun to solve issues of accountability and employee visibility, but selecting the right technology for your organization to scale remote staffers is a critical and potentially costly initial investment.

Drew Brody, COO/CFO for TRU Staffing Partners, believes “no one technology will solve all your remote management problems.” Instead, Brody contends that “the key to successfully managing a work from home staff is in selecting the right combination of tools and technologies in concert with detailed and documented processes and protocols for using these chosen technologies.” There are several reasons to use virtual management technology: a centralized place for companywide information (CRM tool, Intranet, SharePoint), communication tools (video and audio), time tracking, screen sharing (group or individual training tools), documentation of efforts and accessibility. Some tools solve several problems at once. Paul Prewitt, director of client services for Contact Discovery Services, also an advocate for WFH staffing, has “found that the advanced IM applications that have voice, video and screen share capabilities help to close the gaps” in areas of accountability and communication. Prewitt, like Brody, is a big fan of Skype for Business because it “gives (his) team the ability to communicate in a variety of ways one-on-one or as a group and allows (him) to have insight into who is online and available.” Skype for Business, formerly Lync for Microsoft, will indicate if an employee is “available, busy, off work, do not disturb, on a call” and more. The tool also allows each user to IM screen share with multiple internal employees at once making training and demonstration simple and easy. The tool also boasts a mobile app so employees can always stay connected and in communication (even when they take advantage of being away from their desk). Cloud providers, like Microsoft 365, allow employees to access their email and data from anywhere. Cloud solutions also generally address issues of security. “It is highly recommended for going remote, to go to the cloud and choose a top-tier brand to support your virtual infrastructure,” professes Brody.

Technology solves and automates many issues of remote management regarding accountability and accessibility, but cannot enforce or dictate employee behavior. Remote staffing is not for every role or every individual. Zimmerman knows all too well how challenging finding the right candidate for remote employment can be, “Now that you have made the decision to hire remote, you may find yourself being flooded with resumes.” He is right. According to globalworkplaceanalytics.com “80% to 90% of the U.S. workforce says they would like to telework” at least part-time. In an informal survey taken by TRU Staffing Partners in 2011, the number one motivator for employees to change jobs in legal technology was “compensation,” followed by “vertical mobility,” with desire to “work remotely” in fifth place. The same survey in 2015 found that desire to work remotely moved to the number three motivator for legal tech pros. Bottom line: legal tech professionals, like the rest of Americans, want to work more from home. Desire, however, does not always equal aptitude for remote employment. “The interview process holds even greater importance when looking for people who can self-manage and self-motivate,” adds Prewitt. “Asking traditional interview questions about the candidate’s experience won’t give you the info you need to determine if the person is the right fit for a remote position,” he continues. Some questions to consider: “Tell me about how you organize your calendar. How much time do you spend on the phone a day? Do you enjoy that? What does the area in your home that you would work remotely from look and feel like? Does it have good sunlight? What kinds of technology do you interact with daily, hardware and websites?” Often certain people thrive on being “in the room” in order to feel creative and fulfilled, and while these might typically be fantastic hires, their need for face-to-face human interaction will ultimately make them ill-suited for the position.

Hiring someone who will work from home doesn’t mean you should only interview them from home. Zimmerman urges employers to “still meet the candidates in-person during the interview process because there is a lot that you can gather from an in-person meeting that just doesn’t translate via a video conference call.” Body language, eye contact, handshakes, apparel and more are always indicators of professionalism and fit. According to theundercoverrecruiter.com, “55% of (interview) impact comes from the way the person dresses, acts and walks through the door, (while) 65% of bosses indicate that clothes could be a deciding factor between two almost-identical candidates.” Just because an employee works from home does not preclude them from potentially meeting clients or other employees in person down the road. Do not cheat yourself from making smart hiring decisions by shortcutting the interview process. Additionally, spending some time in-person after being hired is an important part of creating and defining company culture. Prewitt believes “it helps to plan at least two events a year that bring everyone together under one roof in a collaborative effort.” Prewitt contends that these quarterly or semiannual events “make it that much easier for resources to reach out and collaborate while hundreds or even thousands of miles apart.”

In closing, Zimmerman draws important attention to a community of professionals that have always thrived on remote employment and had little struggle with employer buy-in for the model: sales professionals. “If after reading this article you are still in doubt or cautiously optimistic, I encourage you to look at the sales profession.” Most salespeople work remotely and are not measured by how much they work but rather by their production. When you evaluate the types of tools salespeople use, most have a cell phone, computer, secure access to the office network from home, email and a CRM tool like Salesforce.com. That’s it. All these tools can be made available to other employees. Clients are always looking for cost reduction and efficiency without sacrificing results and integrity. Vendors are always looking for ways to increase their margins in an increasingly commoditized market. If remote employment can create savings of time and money while increasing retention and maintaining client satisfaction, then it is perhaps a model worth exploring – not just for law firms and corporations – but more pointedly for the service providers who support them.