We work remotely. I get lots of questions about our arrangements. Today, I’ll give you the behind-the-scenes tour.

We have four locations (Raleigh, Durham, Cary, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina).

Two employees go to our Raleigh office on a daily basis. They have desks in our Raleigh office. One employee handles document processing and manages the seven conference rooms in that office. The other employee handles inbound prospective client calls. She’s in the office, instead of at home, so that we have backup coverage for the front desk. She’s part of a small team, and they rotate days in the office and at home.

Reception duties in our other locations are handled by employees provided by these facilities. These are executive suite locations with reception provided. We lease rooms in each of these locations and furnish them as small conference rooms. We also have access to additional conference rooms when the need arises.

Three of our attorneys handle the bulk of our initial consultations. These attorneys go into the office when in-person consultations are scheduled for them. Otherwise, they work mostly from home.

We receive mail only at our Raleigh location. Any mail inadvertently sent to one of our other locations is overnighted to Raleigh.

Many of our functions—marketing, phone reception, human resources, accounting and bookkeeping, document indexing, and IT—are outsourced and have no involvement with our physical locations.

Several members of our team never visit our conference rooms. They simply work from home or other locations near their homes. Those employees include our managing attorney, operations manager, marketing assistant, and paralegals.

The remaining members of our team—the attorneys—come to the office when required. They reserve a conference room in a convenient location for client meetings, settlement conferences, mediations, etc.

Each of our conference rooms is arranged with a conference table and between four and eight chairs. We’ve got art on the walls, a lamp, and a small side table. All attorneys have a device for scanning credit cards and checks that attaches to their mobile device. Each location has a cafe area with drinks. Each location also has a scanner/printer.

Frequently Asked Questions

I get the following questions with some frequency:

Do the attorneys have offices?

No. They work from home, a coffee shop, or wherever they like. They can always reserve a conference room in one of our locations if the need arises.

Do you have telephones in your conference rooms?

No. All team members have a cell phone, and they all have soft phones on their laptops.

Do your attorneys have phones at home?

No. They mostly use the soft phones on their laptops with earbuds or a headset.

How does your team communicate internally?

They stay in touch all day long via Skype and Chatter (a Twitter-like internal chat space).

Does everyone live near an office?

No. We have employees and contractors across the globe in a dozen different countries. Our attorneys meet with clients and appear in court, so they frequently need to come to an office. However, some of them arrange their schedules so they can work from remote places for long periods.

Where is your server?

We have no servers in our offices. We use hosted products like Salesforce, NetDocuments, Vonage, and Google Apps. These products do not require us to maintain our own server. We own only laptops, printers, and mobile devices.

Do your people get lonesome?

Yes, and they sometimes meet up for lunch or agree to a work date at one of our offices.

Do you spend much on real estate?

We spend about 25% of what we spent four years ago. Our real estate expense is trivial.

Do your clients react negatively to the executive suites?

Nope. In fact, we have data demonstrating that our clients don’t discriminate between locations. They do, however, discriminate among lawyers. The lawyer placed in the room makes all the difference.

Where are you—Lee Rosen—working right now?

I keep my schedule in the right sidebar of Divorce Discourse. I’m sailing from Spain to Ft. Lauderdale on the Emerald Princess as I write this. I’ll be in Miami for a few months, and then I’m headed to Asia for the winter.

[ While I have you here, I wanted to remind you that you can get the latest articles delivered to your inbox a week before they go up on the web. Just one email per week. Sign up here. ]

What questions do you have now? Feel free to leave them in the comments below, and I’ll do my best to answer.