Canadian Lawyer

26 J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 8 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m and grandeur. Even to this day, in the United Kingdom, the most acclaimed law- yers situate themselves in prestigious "Inns of Court," which resemble small-scale Ivy League university campuses. Professional conceits notwithstanding, lawyers have had good reason to hew to traditional office structures, which allow them to ensconce themselves in private, four-walled rooms, set apart from secretar- ies and other laypeople. Before the wide- spread adoption of email, when legal dis- cussions were almost invariably conducted in person or over the phone, it made sense to create an architecture that acted as a bricks-and-mortar cone of silence. In the more status-conscious days of yore, more- over, clients expected that their lawyer's offices should look at least as stately as that of, say, a bank manager or a corporate vice president. But those days are gone. Many corpo- rate closings now are conducted digitally, and most lawyers no longer need great swathes of desk (or floor) to organize case files. Thanks to the availability of video conferencing and other digital communi- cations media, many clients will go months or even years without meeting their law- yers in person. What clients want most from the relationship are cost-effective results, not stylish trappings. And while only a minority of Canadian law firms have embraced the open-concept model as enthusiastically as Marcus Sixta, his Cross- roads offices provide a good sense of how lawyers will react to these trends. I f the open-plan law firm movement in Canada has a leader, it's arguably Michael Walker, managing partner of Miller Thomson LLP's 75-lawyer team in Vancouver, which recently migrated from its long-time home at 840 Howe St. to a newly constructed space at 725 Granville. In part, Walker told me, Miller Thom- son chose its new Vancouver location because it allowed all of the firm's person- nel to situate themselves on a single floor — instead of spread over four floors, as at the Howe St. location. "We wanted to be more collaborative," Walker said at the time. "Lawyers enclosed in their offices got in the way." At Howe St., the Miller Thomson arrangement hewed to the usual large law firm schematic — with windowed lawyers' offices arranged on the periphery and a pool of support staff spread out within. But the dictates of Euclidean geometry made this approach impossible to dupli- cate in the new space because of how perimeter shrinks in relation to area when a square expands. By way of example: In a 50,000-square-foot space that is divided evenly among four floors — each with 12,500 square feet — roughly 46 per cent of the floor space will be located within 15 feet of an outer building wall. But if all the space is consolidated into a single 50,000-square-foot floor plate, then that ratio shrinks to 25 per cent. In practical terms, what this meant for Walker was that Miller Thomson's new space on Granville St., if conventionally laid out, would provide only 40 perimeter offices, as compared to the 75 or so he had on Howe. "The math is what led to our first big decision," Walker told me. "The old model with the lawyers' offices on the outside and then a big parking lot of support people in the middle — that wasn't going to work. So we said to ourselves, 'Offices have to come off the glass.' " Once that Rubicon was crossed, Walker told me, a lot of the other stale presump- tions that go into law firm architecture suddenly were up for grabs, such as the Ross Firm Goderich Ross Firm Goderich

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