Biglaw's work from home debate is being settled by landlords
Leasing jumped 17%. The desk was never the constraint.
Law firms leased just under 12.2 million square feet of office space in the first six months of 2026, up 17% on the same period a year earlier. Above the Law reported the figures, which come from Cushman & Wakefield by way of Reuters.
In the second quarter alone, firms took 14% of office leasing in the ten major legal markets Cushman & Wakefield tracks. That is a sector betting on itself with a very long instrument.
The space race
Simpson Thacher's 916,000 square foot relocation was the largest legal deal of the quarter, according to Savills as cited in the same report. Above the Law also notes Duane Morris moving from three required days to four last week, with Sullivan & Cromwell at five. Its reading is that the lease and the mandate have stopped being cause and effect and have become the same gesture. Signed first, staffed after.
What a floor plate buys
Proximity does real work. A second-year learns more from overhearing a partner take a bad call than from any memo about it, and supervision in a corridor is faster than supervision in a queue. Firms committing to space are buying something that exists. But what firms say their operational priorities are gets collected and published annually by the Thomson Reuters Institute, and a lease resolves none of them. A tracker measures presence and so does a turnstile, which is why neither one tells a partner whether the brief is right.
Attendance is the easiest thing in a firm to count. That is most of why it gets counted.
For everyone else
The risk is downstream. A 40-person practice reads the Biglaw mandate as settled best practice and copies the policy without the balance sheet that produced it. Biglaw has expensive square footage to justify. A mid-size firm has a backlog, a partner doing conflict checks at nine at night, and no spare review hours anywhere in the building. Those are different problems and only one of them is solved by a desk.
The leases are real and the optimism behind them may be too. Neither one clears a document review.
Square feet do not read files.
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