Fortune 500 Clients Tell Law Firms To Go Right Ahead And Work From Home

'Yeah, we don't know what Morgan Stanley's smoking.'

After Morgan Stanley beclowned itself in a memo encouraging its lawyers to shun work from home policies and get back to work, other elite clients are rushing to assure attorneys that they really don’t care where people work from as long as the quality remains top-notch.

Legal chiefs from Dell, Qualcomm, and Adobe told Bloomberg Law that they couldn’t care less about the issue that seems to have Morgan Stanley so hot and bothered.

“I feel no need to dictate to my outside law firms how they should manage through these difficult times,” said longtime Qualcomm general counsel Donald Rosenberg.

It’s a message that places the major companies more in line with the mood of Biglaw, where top lawyers privately expressed shock at Morgan Stanley’s gumption in presuming to lean on its counsel.

“It’s so out of tune with the rest of the market – a complete outlier”, a finance partner at a U.S. firm in London says. “When I saw that, I thought he was tone deaf.”

“If [investment banks] cannot even give us freedom on where to work, they may as well hire robots,” the partner adds.

They also argue that the stance does not match up with the reality of working with the bank. That partner recently advised the bank on a cross-border transaction, with the matter entirely conducted via Zoom and email.

They say that there were no hints of any unhappiness with where they worked on the mandate, and as a result, they doubt “anybody is taking this seriously.”

It brings us back to our original suspicion that the bank might be more concerned about the prospect of permanent work from home models creating problems for the bottom line. Problems that other top-tier clients don’t share.

Indeed, as Bloomberg Law points out, Adobe is already in the process of permanently shifting to a 50-50 office/home work model. The company is hardly going to take its lawyers to task for coming to the same conclusions.

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“While we haven’t yet had discussions with our outside counsel about their work arrangements, the quality of their work is more important to us than where they do their work,” [Adobe GC Dana] Rao said. “Our outside law firms are our partners, and we trust them to figure out the model that works best for them and us.”

“The customer is always right” may be a well-worn maxim but it’s got limits. We’ll see how far it can stretch as we get into the autumn and firms begin the put up or shut up phase of reopening.

Tech Legal Leaders Veer From Morgan Stanley Return-to-Work Order [Bloomberg Law]
‘Arrogant’ and ‘Tone Deaf’: Morgan Stanley CLO Stance Draws Ire From UK, European Finance Partners [UK Legal Week]

Earlier: ‘We Need All Lawyers In The Office’ Says Bank Definitely Not Freaking Out About Commercial Real Estate Portfolio


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HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.