As she recently told Law.com's Abigail Harris, "Ultimately, hybrid workforce strategies are here to stay, and I strongly believe that those fighting against the change will increasingly lose staff to more flexible environments."

For now, plenty continue to fight, many of them powerful executives in the banking industry.

"I'm about to cancel all my Zoom meetings," Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase CEO, groused at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council last year. "I'm done with it."

Dimon also said clients told him that in cases where JPMorgan lost out on business, it was because "bankers from the other guys visited, and ours didn't. Well, that's a lesson."

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon struck a similar tone at a Credit Suisse Group conference last year.

"It's not a new normal," he said. "It's an aberration that we are going to correct as quickly as possible."

Despite such comments, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs aren't planning to entirely ban working from home. But their CEOs' public declarations are going to be noticed by workers who thought the days were over when they felt they were asking for a favor when they asked to work from home.

Many legal departments already are embracing working from home—so much so, in fact, that their willing to consider hiring general counsel who live in another state, far from the headquarters, Law.com's Hugo Guzman reported this month.

Those that are requiring relocation are paying a price, John Gilmore, co-founder and managing partner of the executive search firm BarkerGilmore, told Guzman.

"Large companies that have been resistant about having remote workers are struggling to find the quality and diversity of talent they're looking for," he said. "They're starting to open it up now, where people can work remote."

Work-from-home advocates acknowledge there are benefits to being in the office, such as the spontaneous brainstorming that face-to-face interactions sometimes spark. But they say video conferences are plenty effective for most meetings.

Jason Stephans, the newly hired general counsel of Newport, Rhode Island-based Lang Pharma Nutrition, epitomizes the new way of thinking.

Stephans, who lives in Montvale, New Jersey, won't be moving to Rhode Island for the job, which began last week. But he decided to spend that first week in the office to smooth the onboarding process and meet as many of his legal, regulatory and commercial colleagues as possible.

From here, he's confident he'll achieve his goal of deeply immersing himself into other parts of the company while working 175 miles from the headquarters.

"When not on-site, these connections and ability to interact have been made possible due to the current state of technology allowing us to communicate on video as opposed to just via audio," he told Law.com's Phillip Bantz. "While the latter can be effective, the former allows for more of a personal connection and sets the foundation for a solid relationship."

What's your take on what level of remote work legal departments should embrace? Email me to share your thoughts or offer ideas for future issues of Inside Track. Thanks for reading!

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