Crain's Chicago Business reports:
Law firms across town are redesigning their offices to shrink their real estate needs—and their rent.
At Dentons, that means Chicago managing partner Mary Wilson has been purging her bookshelves and tossing binders from legal conferences 20 years ago to help her fit into an office that will be 35 square feet smaller. “You don't want to have space you don't need,” she says. “It doesn't make economic sense.”
Dentons reduced its footprint by embracing emerging trends in law firm design: glass-fronted offices that create a sense of spaciousness, clustered workstations for support staff, corner offices replaced by “huddle” spaces where legal teams can work together. Most radically, the firm has eliminated office sizes based on seniority: In the new floor plan, every lawyer gets 165 square feet.
Because the firm's footprint in Willis Tower decreases to less than 126,000 square feet, its gross rent could fall nearly 30 percent to $4.9 million annually, based on information from CoStar Group, a Washington, D.C., real estate data company. (The figure could be lower if Dentons negotiated additional concessions from its landlord.)
There's more:
Law firms traditionally have used more space than other professional service industries. Between 2002 and 2004, law firms averaged about 11,000 square feet nationally, while accounting firms averaged 8,500, according to CoStar. Over the next decade accounting firms shrank their square footage by 45 percent while increasing headcount by 19 percent. Meanwhile, law firms shed 4 percent of their employees but decreased their floor space by only 17 percent.
In 2014, law firms across the country spent on average about 6 percent of their gross revenue on real estate, down slightly from a year earlier, according to a survey from commercial real estate broker Cushman & Wakefield in New York.
The demand for square footage in Blue America.
