Featured in the January ALA Legal Management Magazine
Five years after the pandemic, the law firm office is no longer just a physical footprint—it is a strategic asset that directly affects culture, collaboration, client service, and attorney experience. Yet even as firms refine hybrid policies and reshape real estate portfolios, many still struggle to connect the dots between flexibility and functionality. Attendance remains inconsistent, collaboration space is often mismatched to actual behavior, and leaders lack the data needed to guide long-term decisions.
Maptician’s 2025 Law Firm Workplace Trends Survey reveals an industry in transition—more agile, more technologically enabled, and more intentional than in prior years, but still grappling with the structural and cultural complexities of modern work.
Utilization across major U.S. markets sits between 55% and 60% on average, far below the 90%+ occupancy firms saw pre-pandemic. Tuesdays and Wednesdays continue to peak, while Fridays reach historic lows. This uneven pattern requires firms to rethink not only how much space they need, but what kind of space best supports attorneys when they are in the office.
Across the survey data, one theme is clear: leading firms are no longer managing offices—they are designing environments. They are shifting from seat maps to strategy, using space, culture, and technology as interconnected tools that support performance, mentorship, and well-being. The results point to a new definition of what a “strong law firm environment” looks like in 2026.
People: Redefining Presence With Purpose
For years, return-to-office discussions centered on compliance—mandates, monitoring, and attendance benchmarks. In 2025, the conversation has matured. Firms now recognize that presence happens when people have a reason to show up. The survey data reinforces this: 62% of firms use in-office events and perks to encourage attendance, while only 15% tie presence to compensation.
This shift reflects an emerging truth: attorneys respond not to mandates, but to meaningful experiences. Mentorship, team rituals, partner connectivity, and client interactions remain the strongest drivers of in-office engagement. In fact, firms with structured team-based anchor days—or those that intentionally align presence around collaborative work—report stronger mid-week attendance, more predictable patterns, and greater enthusiasm for in-office time.
The people component of workplace strategy has become deeply cultural. Firms are intentionally rebuilding belonging and connection after years of fragmentation. They are pairing flexibility with expectations around mentoring days; reestablishing social glue through practice-group rituals; and creating norms that give presence a clear purpose. Without this cultural infrastructure, flexible models can quickly devolve into disengagement and inconsistent participation—one of the biggest risks firms face today.
Place: Designing Offices That Support How Attorneys Actually Work
If the last decade of law firm real estate was defined by efficiency, the next decade will be defined by intentionality. The 2025 survey shows significant shifts in how firms allocate space—changes that reflect attorney behavior more closely than legacy norms.
Over 58% of firms increased flexible seating such as hoteling, while fewer than 20% expanded assigned seating. Nearly half reduced their seat-to-professional ratio. These adjustments signal the industry’s increasing recognition that legacy one-attorney-one-office layouts no longer match hybrid work patterns.
Yet the most striking real estate shift is the growth of collaboration space. Respondents reported an average 6.6% increase in square footage dedicated to meetings and group work. Peak-day congestion, rising cross-functional teams, and the evolving needs of partner collaboration and business development are driving this investment. The office is becoming a collaboration hub rather than an individual workspace.
Conference rooms are the most in-demand reservable spaces, followed by dedicated offices and huddle rooms. Corner offices and lounges—once the status symbols of legal culture—rank significantly lower. This change reflects a powerful cultural evolution: attorneys now value utility over prestige and gravitate toward spaces that enable teamwork, not hierarchy.
When designed intentionally, physical environments can strengthen mentorship, promote knowledge sharing, and support meaningful attorney development. But when collaboration spaces are mismatched to behavior—or when seating models lack structure—firms risk creating confusion, bottlenecks, or underutilized square footage. Matching space to real patterns of work is now a strategic imperative.
Technology: Integrating the Tools That Power a Modern Workplace
In 2023, most firms relied heavily on Outlook, spreadsheets, and a patchwork of tools to coordinate seating and conference rooms. In 2025, the landscape looks entirely different. More than 50% of firms have adopted workplace management technology in the past two years, and nearly 27% expanded use of new platforms in the same period.
While this progress signals an important step forward, it also reveals a common challenge: fragmentation. Many firms use one system for room booking, another for visitor management, and a separate tool—or none at all—for seat booking. Without a unified platform, leaders struggle to access reliable analytics about space usage, attendance, team behaviors, or collaboration patterns.
This data is essential. As the report makes clear, flexibility without structure leads to underutilization and inefficiency. Real-time analytics help firms understand who is using what space, when, and why. They allow leaders to calibrate policies, adjust layouts, and refine long-term real estate strategy. And they are critical for modeling future space needs—an especially urgent priority as firms enter new lease cycles.
Unified tools like Maptician allow firms to manage seat booking, room reservations, visitor coordination, and workplace analytics in one consistent system—turning the office from a static footprint into a dynamic, data-driven asset.
From Seat Maps to Strategy: Building the Strong Law Firm Environment
Taken together, the survey results show an industry in the midst of transformation—but not yet at its destination. Flexibility has become standard, but not always structured. Collaboration has increased, but sometimes faster than firms can support. Technology adoption is accelerating, but often without integration. And above all, culture remains the cornerstone of any successful hybrid model.
The firms that are thriving are the ones that treat the office as a strategic ecosystem—shaped by people, enabled by place, and powered by technology. They align attendance with purpose, allocate space in ways that match real use, and embrace unified systems that illuminate how the workplace actually functions.
A strong law firm environment in 2026 is not defined by square footage or policy alone. It is defined by the interplay of human experience, intentional design, and operational intelligence. As hybrid work becomes the norm rather than the exception, law firms that adopt this integrated approach will be best positioned to strengthen culture, improve collaboration, future-proof their real estate—and build firm environments where attorneys can do their best work.
