Founding Partner, Michelle Foster, Quoted by The American Lawyer on What's Spurring Vaccine Mandates at Some Big Law Firms
/‘People’s Patience Is Wearing a Little Thin’: What’s Spurring Vaccine Mandates at Some Big Law Firms
Many law firms earlier this year went out of their way to encourage COVID-19 vaccines without mandating them. But now more Am Law 200 law firm leaders are getting strict, implementing new restrictions and forcing personnel to get shots in their arms—or else get shut out of the firm’s offices.
What’s changed? Besides the surge of cases due to the contagious delta variant and new guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, other factors are at play. A push by large corporate clients, as well as the need to keep some semblance of office return plans, have also contributed to a wave of law firm vaccine mandates, firm leaders and legal industry observers say.
While Morgan Stanley’s push to bring lawyers back to the office may not have forced firms to abandon their flexible work plans, clients still have plenty of influence on firm behavior. And several major corporations, from Disney to Walmart and Google, have now implemented vaccine mandates for their own workers in some fashion.
Goldman Sachs has also reportedly informed employees that their building ID cards will not work if they fail to report their vaccine status—similar to the message Davis Polk & Wardwell is taking.
Brad Hildebrandt, of Hildebrandt Consulting, said he would expect client pushback against law firms that didn’t have all their people vaccinated, even just for practical reasons, such as giving clients assurance during face-to-face meetings.
He also noted that many firms are generally only dealing with a small portion of workers who aren’t vaccinated, so it’s easier to mandate it than if, say, half of the firm wasn’t vaccinated.
“Leadership has to run the law firm for clients and for the safety of the people who are going to come back,” he said. “The people coming back, from partners to associates, want people who are vaccinated.”
Law firms also don’t want their office return plans to get derailed by outbreaks, or even just the fear of spreading the virus, analysts and leaders say. Combined with the other reasons, that’s partially why leaders are starting to be more forceful about the vaccine.
“Firms are becoming more firm about what they want people to do, particularly requiring vaccinations,” said Jeffrey Lowe, a recruiter who is practice leader of the law firm practice group at Major, Lindsey & Africa. “There was a period where people were much more comfortable and willing to be flexible, but what I’m seeing at firms, and just generally, is people’s patience is wearing a little thin about this because they don’t want to continue in this way indefinitely.”
Lowenstein Sandler chair and managing partner Gary Wingens has said his firm has had success getting people to come into the office over the summer, before a larger firmwide return in September. Part of the reason Lowenstein is now mandating that personnel get vaccinated is that leaders there didn’t want to lose momentum toward reaching that target.
“The last thing we want to do is backslide,” he said. “As people were starting to get more nervous about delta the past few weeks, we got the sense people would stop coming in if they didn’t understand who was around and didn’t know the vaccination status of people in the office.”
In an interview last week, he said it was a “toss-up” as to whether the Sept. 7 date for the next phase of the firm’s reopening plan would get moved back. But “rather than backsliding, let’s give people comfort that they can come in, and we are creating as safe an environment as we can,” he added.
Other firms appeared to echo these thoughts, confirming that personnel can’t work remotely full-time forever, despite new variants.
Goodwin Procter, which linked a vaccine mandate to FDA approval of the vaccine, said it looks forward to its office reopening in September. “Once our offices reopen, non-vaccination status will not be considered a legitimate reason to support 100% remote work,” said the firm in a Tuesday statement.
And while law firms generally have been thoughtful on COVID-19 policies, the latest surge in cases and updated CDC guidance would force more of them to switch from strongly encouraging vaccination for their employees to requiring it, said Michelle Foster, the managing partner of the legal recruiting firm The Foster Group in New York.
“At least from everything I’m seeing, there’s a big push toward getting as close to 100% as possible having the vaccine,” she said.