Would You Bet Against Jamie Dimon?
We are social creatures. While Mr. Dimon may be right about coming back to the office, I think the motivation will come more from human nature and the need to out-work the competition than a mandate.
We are social creatures. While Mr. Dimon may be right about coming back to the office, I think the motivation will come more from human nature and the need to out-work the competition than a mandate.
Landmark Advisory Services was founded in 2013 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. However, Landmark’s heritage of representing commercial tenants goes back more than 30 years. We were rolled out of a property management firm that was representing private and institutional landlords while also representing tenants through an advisory division. As each business grew, they needed to be separated and so we were created in 2013 and subsequently the landlord management firm was sold to Colliers International.
Many companies are wondering if and how the office should be adapted to the new “working from home” (WFH) reality. To help answer these questions and more, Solved developed a workplace survey using their years of experience and insight into the current pandemic situation. Download the findings in this in-depth whitepaper.
Interestingly, after the stay-at-home orders, tenants and their advisors focused their lease reviews almost exclusively on the tenant’s lease obligations and whether they were excused, but spent little time reviewing the landlord’s obligations and whether they were excused.
Remote working is here to stay, and it will certainly become an integral part of the law firm work paradigm going forward. However, as law firms start to contemplate how this WFH trend will impact their office footprints in the future, they should be careful not to blindly follow what other industries are doing.
When the world changes so fast, it is natural to start thinking strategically about the future. And what prevails: the quality of the workplace or the idea of saving money?
Despite children in the background and a lack of preparation, this [work from home] arrangement seems to be working. However, before we become too enamored of this new work paradigm, we should appreciate that its relative success is due only to the strong foundations that were built in the office prior to the pandemic.
Before approaching their landlords, it’s critical that tenants first understand the landlords’ legal positions, the constraints they face and their perceived leverage under the circumstances.
Any contemplated change in design or layout by a tenant should account for the fact that, like the Spanish Flu of 1908, COVID-19 won’t be around for long. When it leaves, a company’s office design and configuration needs to make sense and needs to be cost effective. A blind rush to the latest and greatest could be very costly.