We have conference rooms in four different office buildings. From time to time, the landlord requires us to relocate from one space to another. It’s happening now in our Raleigh office.

We’re used to doing it. It’s happened so many times over the past 25 years that it’s routine.

We work with an architect and map out the size of each room, wall coverings, light fixtures, etc.

One of the issues that always comes up is the number and placement of outlets in the conference rooms. I’m talking about the plug things in the wall for getting electricity, phone service, and Internet.

How We Used to Power Up

Our requirements have changed over time.

We used to ask for one power outlet. We’d position it behind the corner table that had a lamp and a phone sitting on top. That was usually enough. In a big conference room, we’d ask for a second outlet for use with a video monitor and visiting computer. Pretty simple.

On top of our power outlet, we’d ask for a block of Ethernet outlets (usually three). We used these RJ-45 connections to run any non-Wi-Fi computers plus our conference room phones.

In the new space, our configuration will be different.

A New Balance of Power

We need more power outlets. Nearly everyone coming into our conference rooms—both lawyers and clients—wants power. We end up with everybody plugged in. We’re putting outlets on every wall that isn’t a floor-to-ceiling window. In a perfect world, we’d have the outlets built into the conference room tables. Unfortunately, our world isn’t perfect, and this building isn’t well designed for outlets in the floors.

The bigger change is that we need fewer Ethernet outlets. In fact, we’re not putting any Ethernet outlets in our conference rooms. These outlets used to let us plug in laptops and phones. Now, the laptops all connect via our Wi-Fi network. That happened long ago. We haven’t connected to the Internet with Ethernet cables in quite some time.

The phones are a different story. We’ve known that our conference room phones were rarely used. Everybody used cell phones rather than the conference room phones. For some reason, however, our team resisted the idea of letting them go. A conference room without a phone feels like it’s missing something important. It feels a little empty.

Some lawyers will hang on to the idea of speakerphones for conference rooms. The good news is that there are plenty of high-end speakerphones running on Wi-Fi. Better than a speakerphone, however, is a Wi-Fi-enabled Skype video connection. We use a Logitech device.

Today, the phones are gone. They’ve been packed up and sold. No one was using them, and it seemed pointless to run cables for them at several hundred dollars per connection. They’re history.

As you create new space and redesign old space, be cognizant of the changes. In many respects, technology can be expensive. However, it can also represent a big savings.