Individual offices of in-house counsel may be shrinking, plus file, don’t pile

A survey for office furniture maker Steelcase, summarized in BusinessWeek, April 9, 2007 at 12, polled 9,300 white-collar workers. Their data reveals that “the typical private office has shrunk from 16 by 20 feet a few years ago to a more common 8 by 10 today.” I suspect the same scaling-down has affected the office sizes of inside counsel.

Information is sketchy on the architecture of in-house counsel offices (See my posts of Feb. 20 and Nov. 19, 2005 on cubicles for lawyers (“open plan” for British readers); May 3, 2007 on temporary offices; Nov. 8, 2005 on movable desks at SEI; and March 23, 2007 on office proximity and interaction.). The reason may well be that general counsel have little say in the layout of office space. There is also talk from time to time about having all offices of the same size for the lawyers of inside teams.

Oh, and one more comment on space usage. “The study found that most of us make our offices even more cramped by piling papers, rather than filing them.” But how then do we show we are busy?