Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas (CAM) has postponed the opening of its physical offices until 31 March 2021 “pending the resolution of the health crisis”, from when it will introduce a policy that will allow staff to work from home (WFH) and more flexibly, according to a press release from the firm earlier today.
We understand that the move follows several internal surveys of staff and law students at 16 law schools, which suggested that around 80% would like to take advantage of the option of working from home. And we had reported earlier this month that the firm had been working on such a policy, after having announced that offices would re-open on 19 October.
From 1 April 2021, this will allow several models of working flexibly for CAM fee-earners and staff, in addition to the firm planning to transition fully to being a digital and paperless office (the now age-old buzzword that the legal industry has never quite managed to implement).
Managing partner Cyril Shroff commented in a press release: “We have adopted dynamic working models that are aligned with the future of work, built on a world class digital infrastructure and aimed towards enhancing productivity and our talent experience.
“We are ready to bring in the transformative change to lead the legal industry.”
However, the devil will very much lie in the details. Traditionally a main impediment in lawyers working flexibly has been that take up may be limited unless it comes right from the top and with assurances that your career won’t suffer if you are not seated in the office all hours of the day.
Then again, some of that prejudice against WFH may have evaporated with Covid-19, in perhaps one of the few good things to come out of the pandemic.
We have reached out to Shroff for further comment and will update the article if we get more information.
Update-1, 17:20: We have updated the article with several more detailed explanations from Shroff below.
1. Work from office. My guess is 15-20% will continue with that option, especially the litigators
2. Hybrid. 60-70% will choose this. One day minimum you have to work from the office, and one day compulsory must work from home.
3. Short term work from anywhere option - either for childcare or elder care - once in five years, for 6 months. You don’t have to report to office once a week. It’s not taken as leave.
4. A more long term work from anywhere option. Do I want to work from my home town forever? We think there are some very very bright people who want to be associated with CAM and will choose this option. A combination of our alumni will love this, and also some of our existing people will migrate.
5. Flexi lawyer - gig-like, for three to six months, they will service us. And eventually if it builds up scale, some [of this service may be made available] to clients. This meets the ups and downs [and] demand].
In our view this kind of covers the potential universe of all options.
Flexible working
One option that will theoretically be available to staff will be flexible working, where some staff and fee-earners can opt to WFH between one and four days per week, being in the office the remaining days in the week.
Staff who would like to take advantage of the option can apply with their preferences, which would be evaluated by each team and management.
Those who take advantage of the option would not have a permanent desk in an office anymore but would be hot-desking, which means being potentially allocated a new workspace whenever they are in the office.
Some business services functions, for instance, might have to be in the office, and some fee-earners in areas such as litigation may also have to be in the office more than others.
“It’s not a birthright,” said Shroff about whether all lawyers could opt for more flexible arrangements, since entirely new contracts would be drawn up for those who take up the option.
However, he said that the policy stated that there would be no differentiation between fee-earners who opted to work from home or from the office. “Reward and compensation, all these [things] are equal”, he noted. “Everything is the same, no change. We are just accepting it [flexi working] as the model.”
Work from anywhere as a more long-term options
This will be an option for more senior specialist staff and fee-earners, who may be able to opt for longer term arrangements to work from home indefinitely.
They might even be working outside the country or in a city different from their home office.
On an ad hoc basis it is not entirely new for firms to have had lawyers operating remotely without an office on location - Khaitan & Co’s Paku Khan had moved to the US in 2016 to build its competition practice from there.
CAM’s plan would put such arrangements on a formal footing though again, much like with flexible working, it will be subject to approval from management and it will depend on how many actually end up taking it up.
There are “lots of brilliant brilliant people” available, for whom Shroff predicted this would be an attractive option. “It opens up a whole new talent market for me and creates more competition,” he said.
One-off remote working possibilities + short term gig-like flexi-lawyering
Once every five years, staff will also have the option to work remotely from anywhere for a period of up to six months, to attend to personal needs.
The firm would also take on fee-earner resources more flexibly for short-term assignments based on specific needs.Office space less necessary
From 1 January 2021, CAM would also close its physical offices in Hyderabad and Chennai, with WFH becoming the default.
There are around 10 lawyers in both those offices. Shroff said that those offices would be “notionally on the books of the Bangalore office, but otherwise business as usual”.
Those who have to have meetings in a physical space, would be using business centres.
Shroff said that this would not only save costs but also gives more flexibility. “If this model can work, it would [work] for other places as well.” International firms such as Dentons had started similar policies for two of its offices, he added.
The firm’s Mumbai office - which is owned by the firm’s promoter family - would retain its current space to allow for future growth although there are plans to redesign the space for more meeting rooms and to allow for hot-desking.
Survey headlines of 650 staff: 55% more productive at home
Tech upgrades
Expands on previous attempts at flexi working
In its press release, CAM had said: “We believe we are the first law firm to announce this and expect that this will set the benchmark.”
That said, it is not entirely new although it goes further than others have before.
The CAM policy expands on the footsteps of Khaitan & Co, which had in 2018 announced out flexible working as an option to court millennials, including “agile working” of up to 12 days per year and sabbatical leave of three months after five years of working with the firm.
We have reached out to Khaitan (which had in July of this year announced WFH to be the default until the end of 2020) for information on how many staffers have taken up these offers, before the pandemic.
We will update this article when we hear from them.
Update-2, 26 October: Khaitan HR director Amar Sinhji said: “In the last financial year i.e pre pandemic (upto March 2020), ~35% of our members opted to use our agile working and time-off policies, including WFH, recuperation and sabbatical leave.”
Shroff, for one, said that he hoped the approach to flexible working would catch on more widely.
“I would encourage everybody to do it,” Shroff said. “If the whole industry moves, it’ll be better for all of us.”
Photo by Shane Adams.
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From what I hear, KCo.'s model seemed a paper tiger in terms of remote working even pre-COVID, and even during COVID, despite the firm's "WFH till 2020end" policy, understand that KCo.'s Bangalore office has even been threatening consequences for compensation and bonus if people don't turn up to office. This shows that the ground reality at most firms is different from the rosy public picture presented by press releases from the marketing/HR representatives. Hopefully CAM follows the policy in spirit and substance.
Hopefully this puts the pressure on the industry and others follow with proposals along the same lines so the industry as a whole benefits - we as lawyers have been getting away with being stuck in time and resisting change for generations now, and this should set the ball rolling for a more dynamic and interesting future for the legal services industry in India. There could be a few ugly fallouts, and the adjustment will be tough, but will be watching with bated breath.
Now that offices will be closed till a considerable time ( which is a great step), how are they planning to convert the 4th Jan physical joining necessity to virtual.
Will it get extended again ? ( While rest of the firms who don't claim to be world class have already inducted ALL their kids )
New recruits are truly at the bottom of the chain. And it's not a demand, just a request to induct ALL kids
Kudos to CAM.
Crying for shifting across the road.
And they only told us on the day we got our contracts and had tjj in sign it
Kept us completely in the dark till then
COMPLETELY UNETHICAL
1. Poor training
2. Worst students take it up (B-grade students from C-grade management schools)
3. Employers treat employees like slaves, HR merely follows orders from the top
4. HR suffers from an inferiority complex, so they need to boss around a bit
This is a real test for lawyering as a profession as well with the following questions:
1. As a young lawyer, can you afford to be away from your seniors from whom you learn the profession and from the office with proper research material like commentaries (hopefully most of these will become available online slowly)?
2. As a mid-level or senior lawyer (PAs and above), WfH/WFA works only if your clients also work that way. Else, if other lawyers are more regularly in front of the client they may win the work. Alternately, you do BD like now and execute from home.
3. If one is doing long term option for a firm like CAM from a tier 2 / tier 3 city - how do you build clientele and grow? Small town clients will never hire CAM. Although one way to look at it is if the execution is superb, the firm wins and client is only of the firm and not of the partners.
4. Litigators will really struggle. Both courts and counsels will not be ready for this style of working.
1. No you cannot. For the first few years, your learning has to be entirely hands on deck. Without a mentoring senior you cannot learn, it's simply a fact. Imagine doing your first diligence remotely.
2. What client today expects you to meet face to face? Even for years before Covid 95% of client work was done without ever meeting your client.
3. This query doesn't make much sense - how does working from office help build clientele? Clients send work to a partner/firm, not to a city.
4. The CAM policy acknowledges that litigators are going to have to be visiting more frequently. However there are days when the team is merely drafting, proofing and researching, especially the week or so immediately after a hearing, where WFH is doable.
The Big 3 (i.e. NIRF top 3 stars: NLSIU, NLUD and NALSAR): Prized recruits, offered high salaries. Often put in out of the box and challenging roles due to high quality of faculty and intellectual culture at these law schools.
The Mid 4 (NUJS, NLUJ, NLIU, GNLU): Offered same salaries and Big 3, but often put in mechanical roles due to emphasis on rote learning in their education.
The Small 6 (MNLU, NUALS, RMLNLU, RGNUL, HNLU, NLUO): Little below Mid 4.
Jindal: Separate category. Some hired on merit at par with Small 6, some through contacts.
GLC: Separate category. Hired through lifelong internships by bunking classes.
The bonus 16th law school is one where requirements may be though contacts (Symbi, Amity) or another law school on merit (CNLU, DSNLU etc).
As I said, this based on hearsay as the firms will never reveal their formula
Honestly this is the most trolling and BS comment I’ve seen in recent times
Bhai kuch toh sharam kar liya karo
Please go back to the last 4 years recruitment figures and the “treatment” of those recruits and you’ll find out how FALSE this is
- Your small six girl making her mark. While you are at it, try and do some quality work at courts, companies or law firms. Always putting people down, judging a book by it's cover or being a first year law student doesn't pay those bills, son.
Also, big shoutout to Ms. Rashmi Pradeep and her fantastic team for their work on this!
Risk hai toh Ishq hai.
Cheers
I am also sure that there would be disparity among those who choose to wfh and those who actually work from office, no matter the actual amount of work done...just because I am wfh doesn't mean that I haven't burnt my ass on a transaction!! we have discussed this issue SO MANY times (among ourselves - you can't say anything which might not please the shroffs! Dont get fooled and start being honest with them, unless you want them to fire you).
Law firms also have "out of sight, out of mind culture"..if you don't show your face on time, you are frowned upon.
I look forward to receiving a fair policy that does not prejudice my choice between wfh or wfo.
But at the end of the day, they are ahead of the curve. A different curve where your batchmates join and you wait till the joining date gets postponed again.
Sometimes these models sound amazing but are left only on papers because bosses expect employees to come to work and can generally known to be unreasonable. It’s a boss thing I guess and we all need to live with it.
As long as the firm can implement it, it will or should work.
By way of an example many companies have unlimited leave policy but that worked against them. One couldn't avail even the standard 21 leaves after they implemented unlimited leave policy.
And sometimes it is the other way round...the employees take advantage of policies....so one will have to find a middle ground and see what works best for you and hopefully your partner would allow it to work for you.
Happy Sunday !
Now, instead, several teams work like an island! This is not a general statement, but JSA folks will understand.
@JSA JMPs - Take lead guys, do innovative lawyer friendly stuff, and JSA will be back to full glory. Else you are destined to slip down to tier-2. I am not trying to do doomsday-prophecy-trolling. Just do this and keep doing other innovative stuff.
P.S. - Remove the JSA tag, rebrand to something new. Build you own identity. Get a neutral name. Jyoti would love this.
On a side note honestly I am very impressed that for better or worse, Jyoti stays true to his word and completely refuses to ever intervene in JSA proceedings, other than to share lunch with new associates, such a sweetheart.
There have been partners packing the poorly ventilated floors since June and denying medical leave to associates and without a proprietor at the top, there's nobody to ask questions of such inhumane behaviour. Sad!
Since the management team of the firm is elected democratically, I believe the elected management doesn't want to take steps that will anger any of the partners. Not sure if they're doing this to get re-elected (not sure if re-elections are allowed anyway) or simply to not come off as too overbearing.
#WhatCAMDoesTodayKCODoesTomorrow
Saying you work hard isn't enough. It's all about the results you bring !
economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/property-/-cstruction/cyril-shroff-paridhi-karan-adani-buy-rs-36-crore-apartment-in-mumbais-worli/articleshow/78878987.cms
Brilliant initiative, always ahead of the curve !
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