LCD Graduate Fellow
As more and more people work from home in modern society, the virtual office is quickly becoming a staple of our lives. While some companies like Yahoo have nixed the option and publicly condemned working from home, many are adapting to the demands of a 24-7 workweek by offering the virtual office as a viable solution.
The legal field is no different. In fact, a recent study found that 39 percent of attorneys surveyed said the number of employees at their firms who work remotely increased from 2014 to 2015, and 16 percent said their firms planned to redesign office space to accommodate the increasingly mobile work force.
Those numbers are only likely to grow exponentially year over year. With tools like e-discovery, sharing apps like DropBox, and services such as Docusign, the logistics of the virtual legal office are now more feasible than ever. Further, the bolstering of Google Scholar in recent years has made case research increasingly easier and more affordable (read: free) than ever before. (If you haven’t used Google Scholar in a while, it’s definitely worth checking out again.)
The upshot is that lawyers, now more than at any point in history, have all the resources at their fingertips to carry out their jobs almost exclusively from home. This is great news for new lawyers.
But is a work-from-home situation right for you?
There are pros and cons. On the one hand, you get more flexibility and freedom, and you can work in your pajamas if you want! On the other hand, you stand to be hired as an hourly employee or independent contractor, and may not get all the benefits that an in-office worker would get, such as healthcare. It’s ultimately up to you and your employer to decide what will work best, given the type of work and the company’s workflow procedures. At the very least, if working from home is something you’re interested in, it’s worth it to negotiate some work-from-home time into your schedule. It will probably do a lot for your mental health. Or maybe not.And if you do decide to work from home, here are a few things to keep in mind.
1. Make sure you know your employer’s expectations. Some experts recommend creating a “Telecommuting Agreement.” This would discuss things like the scope of your work hours, how often and when you must physically report to the office (if at all), requirements for workplace safety and security of company data, how you report your hours worked, and how often you must check in with your manager.
2. Know who provides and maintains the equipment you will use for work. As you’ll remember from first-year Torts, one important factor of determining whether you are an employee or an independent contractor is who provides the equipment you use to carry out your work. Is your employer willing to provide you with a laptop and access to LexisNexis or Westlaw? Or will you have to provide these on your own? This is important to know, and you may try negotiating a LexisNexis subscription or other important tools with your employer.
3. Keep an airtight reign over your hours, pay, and invoices. Many contract lawyers who work from home do not get taxes taken directly out of their paychecks. This means that at the end of the year, you will have to 1099 your employer. It is therefore important to be extremely diligent in keeping track of and maintaining a complete list of your hours, so that this process will be very simple come January. Create a separate folder that contains your invoices, and back it up online with a service like Google Docs.
4. Prorate business expenses for tax deduction purposes if you are a solo practitioner. One expert explains, “At your home, you probably don’t have Internet service that you use solely for your law [work]. You probably browse the web for fun occasionally or send a friendly e-mail ‘off the clock.’ If you’re mixing business and personal use, you must divide the total cost between the two based on your usage,” she stresses. “You can only deduct as a business expense the piece attributable to business, so if you use your Internet service 75 percent for business, then you can deduct 75 percent of the cost. This rule also applies to the use of your other expenses and utilities—but not your actual home telephone line, which the IRS considers routinely personal and never deductible (even prorated), although you can deduct the cost of a dedicated second line or cell phone.”
