Global Legal Remote Working Survey
Your firm is invited to participate in a complimentary global survey studying the attitudes of your personnel regarding remote working. The survey will be conducted by lawyer and psychologist (and Edge Principal) Jonathan Middleburgh. Edge will provide you with an executed NDA to assure the protection of your firm’s data and privacy.
Your firm will receive a complimentary summary of its own findings as well as access to Jonathan Middleburgh’s global learnings and insights.
If you are interested in having your firm complete the survey or simply have questions, please click here to invite Jonathan Middleburgh to contact you or reach out to him at any time by email:
If your firm has already conducted an internal Remote Working Survey, share it with us (under an NDA) to get Jonathan Middleburgh’s insights and an opportunity to benchmark against other law firms globally.
The context for this survey.
COVID-19 forced law firms almost overnight to adjust to their personnel working from home, regardless of how senior management felt about flexible working pre-pandemic.
Since early this year the majority of firms in the largest jurisdictions have found ways to transact business ‘as usual’ (or mostly ‘as usual’), with most or all of their personnel working from home.
Some firms, such as Linklaters, have already indicated that their personnel will be able to spend a significant proportion of their time working from home post-pandemic. Others such as Reed Smith and Vinson & Elkins have indicated that working from home will continue during the pandemic, but have not yet decided what to do with their workforce post-pandemic.
Many firms are considering whether to shift to an agile working policy post-pandemic and, if so, what that policy should look like. Others are considering whether to mandate working from home and, if so, to what extent.
With a vaccine or vaccines on the horizon, it is time for firms to look beyond the pandemic and to figure out how to configure or reconfigure its workforce.
Looking beyond COVID-19 – a deficit of data on remote working
I, like other colleagues, have been struck by the dearth of data available to help firms with their decision-making. I have seen a couple of surveys that have reported back on results from a number of lawyers who have been part of a larger data set of employees from a number of other sectors – but these have been very small samples. I am aware that a number of firms have been conducting their own internal engagement surveys. But I have not come across a survey that consists of data from a range of different law firms, allowing senior management access to benchmarking data.
As an international consultancy, Edge International is in a unique position – with your help – to gather data from a broad array of firms globally.
I strongly believe that such data will help firms to make more robust and solid decisions, so that they can understand not just what is going on for their workforce but how the experience of their workforce benchmarks against the experience of personnel in other law firms.
The Survey
It is for the above reasons that I have written a Remote Working Survey targeted at law firms, hoping that a wide range of firms will ask their personnel to complete the survey, thereby creating a useful bank of data, which can guide firms in their decision-making.
The Survey, which takes no more than 10-15 minutes to complete, explores a range of psychosocial and other factors relevant to prolonged working from home. It contains questions that will produce both quantitative and qualitative data.
The results of the Survey will hopefully shed light on a range of questions with which law firms are currently grappling.
For example:
- are motivation levels holding up as remote working continues?
- are significant numbers of personnel suffering from well-being issues as a result of prolonged remote working?
- do younger personnel in law firms feel that they have the support and supervision they require while remote working, or are they feeling isolated?
- are some personnel having to work in environments that are not fit for purpose, or perhaps even unsafe?
I believe as firm leaders you will find the answers to these and many other questions highly illuminating.
Like many, I have my own hypotheses in relation to many of the issues relating to remote working. But with such a significant shift in working practices I believe that law firms should be making their decisions on the basis of data rather than hunch or anecdotal evidence. Lazy assumptions based on insufficient data could prove costly in the long run.
It is for this reason that I would strongly encourage you and your firm to participate in the survey. There is no cost to participate and if your firm participates I will provide senior management with a short complimentary report summarizing the results for your firm.
If your firm has already conducted its own internal research (by way of survey) or otherwise, I will be happy to review that data and where appropriate integrate it into the pool of data being gathered via this survey; I will also be happy to provide you with my comments on that data, reviewed against the data from this survey.
Your firm is invited to participate in a complimentary global survey studying the attitudes of your personnel regarding remote working. The survey will be conducted by lawyer and psychologist (and Edge Principal) Jonathan Middleburgh. Edge will provide you with an executed NDA to assure the protection of your firm’s data and privacy.
Your firm will receive a complimentary summary of its own findings as well as access to Jonathan Middleburgh’s global learnings and insights.
If you are interested in having your firm complete the survey or simply have questions, please click here to invite Jonathan Middleburgh to contact you or reach out to him at any time by email:
If your firm has already conducted an internal Remote Working Survey, share it with us (under an NDA) to get Jonathan Middleburgh’s insights and an opportunity to benchmark against other law firms globally.