Clifford Chance

Clifford Chance's approach to returning to our offices

Over the course of the past months, all of our offices have worked remotely at scale. The investments that we had already made into agile working technologies and well-established remote working policies have allowed us to make this unprecedented shift smoothly and with minimal disruption. The extraordinary commitment of our people has ensured that, throughout, client service has been maintained at the very highest level, continuing to support clients on their most complex and business-critical matters. We are immensely proud of the professionalism, collegiality, collaboration and the mutual support that has characterised our teams during this challenging period.

While we have been able to operate very effectively when working remotely, we have been undertaking extensive planning for a gradual and phased return to our offices as lockdowns and other restrictions begin to ease and the risk to our people decreases.

Our approach to any return is governed by a set of global protocols that are applicable to our offices firm-wide. These protocols are driven by the same guiding principles that have informed our decision-making throughout, namely:

• To protect the health and wellbeing of our people
• To avoid contributing to the spread of the virus
• Within those constraints, to maintain the high levels of service our clients rightly expect of us.

Offices will begin a phased return only when it is safe for our people to do so, taking into account local government and health authority guidance, which varies in each of our locations around the world. We have taken the conscious decision that we do not need to rush to return to our offices, given our ability to operate successfully remotely.

Each stage of our phased return will be accompanied by specific precautions designed to protect colleagues, their families, our clients and others with whom we have contact. This will include measures, for example, to support social distancing, enhanced cleaning regimes, continued restrictions on in-person meetings, events and business travel. There will be limits placed on the numbers of people who can be in the office at any given time, with offices adopting the split team working arrangements that we have already deployed effectively in a number of our buildings in Asia Pacific. We will continue to support colleagues who are unable or unready to return to the office, providing them with the option of continuing to work from home.

In tandem with the approach above, we continue to consider what insights and learning we can draw from the past few months. Our considerations of our future IT, real estate, wellbeing, learning and development, onboarding, collaboration, matter management and other strategies will be informed by our coronavirus experience and the extensive feedback we have gathered from our people over the past months.

We are an agile and global organisation, with highly talented and motivated teams. We will continue to adapt in response to and in anticipation of changing circumstances, ensuring that we are always ready to support our clients where they need us.