Legal Industry Return to Office Outpaces Broader Commercial Office Average

With Coronavirus vaccinations expanding nationwide to all adults this month, business leaders are anticipating an acceleration in the return to the office. Kastle’s Back to Work Barometer has tracked this phenomenon in ten major cities nationwide over the past year, revealing regional and industry differences in workplace occupancy rates. A fresh review of access to office buildings finds the legal industry consistently exceeds the average, while tracking overall patterns.

With extensive enagagement in the legal industry, providing services to 49 firms of the AmLaw100, Kastle Systems, the country’s largest managed security services provider to commercial businesses, is sharing anonymized aggregated access data from Kastle-secured businesses in the legal industry to better understand office occupancy patterns following COVID-19.

Compared to the ten-city average on the Kastle Back to Work Barometer, the legal industry is returning to the office sooner than other businesses, with occupancy rates 10 percentage points higher than the average.

“In talking with our law firm clients, we are hearing many factors that have made remote work more challenging for this sector, including  paper heavy office systems and generally being slower to adopt new technologies,” Kastle CEO Haniel Lynn said. “In looking at a return to the office, these and other workplace or cultural factors could also come into play for greater in person activity.”

Association of Legal Administrators Executive Director, April Campbell, JD, agrees and adds “For many of our members, some firms never closed at the beginning of the pandemic. Different local government guidance on what workers were deemed essential meant that in some cities, that sometimes included law firms. There have also been concerns about the ability to onboard new employees and conduct new associate training remotely, so we’re seeing law firms in the office at higher rates.”

Kastle has combined decades of security experience with best practices around managing the novel coronavirus to introduce KastleSafeSpaces, which helps workplaces re-open by making their spaces smarter and safer, while maintaining a level of convenience that’s enabled by technology.

Like the Kastle Back to Work Barometer, Kastle will be releasing updates to the legal industry data weekly on its website and LinkedIn. Through the Kastle Back to Work Barometer, Kastle has been tracking the anonymized activity of 341,000 unique office credential holders in major cities, 31,582 of which are in the legal industry and featured in this analysis.

Kastle Systems has been leading the security industry since 1972 with advanced managed security solutions and services, protecting commercial real estate, multi-family residential, global enterprises, educational institutions, and critical government facilities. Kastle’s state-of-the-art security solutions include access control, video surveillance, visitor management and identity management, as well as a suite of mobile security applications, all integrated on an open, standards-based platform and supported by a team of experts 24x7x365. Headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, Kastle is on CIOViews‘s 2021 List of Top 10 Security Providers.