That's why law firms are adopting better ways to utilise their work environment and enable their staff to accomplish both mission-critical and mundane tasks more efficiently.

Let's look at ways of improving your law office layout:

1. Natural Lighting

Natural lighting is extremely important to have in your office and is known to bring a feel-good factor to workers, which impacts their productivity. A well-lit office with open areas makes for a pleasant workplace and also increases visibility, helping to improve an employee's mood. Natural light is also extremely important for your circadian rhythms, the more of it you have, the better your employees will sleep at night. Therefore, law firms should consider office seating plans and desk arrangements that take advantage of natural lighting whenever possible.

2. Desks and Seating

Provide an ergonomic desk and seat that fit the size and other preferences of each employee. Be sure the seating plan makes for smooth movement to avoid the unhealthy effects of over-sitting. Desks that can transition between sitting and standing working positions can have immense benefits for your employees health. Likewise, keep work spaces clean with no unnecessary items, this can help remove distractions and improve employees' focus.

3. Storage

Proper storage design should be a key part of your office layout plan. Checking the depth and width of folders, boxes, cabinets, and other places for storing your legal paperwork is very important. Likewise, open storage helps workers in an office to quickly locate documents, which helps prioritise and organise workflows. Strategically-located shelves also make for convenient access records. Alternatively you could use an electronic storage solution to remove clutter.

4. Shared Gadgets

Workstations usually share some equipment, for example, printers. In such instances, it is good to identify a central place to position these devices for easier access.

5. Collaboration Spaces

There is a need to have collaboration spaces inside the office for holding team meetings. This sort of arrangement is better suited to legal teams that need to collaborate closely to do their job well.

However, remember to provide privacy to members of your team who need it, collaboration is great but sometimes what is needed is solitude to get through a tough slog of work. Doing so ensures that team members can do what they need to do without disturbing others or being disturbed themselves.

According to research, having the right staff seat close to each other can improve productivity by up to 15%. A suggestion would be having your interns seated closely to their supervisor to allow for them to be better mentored. The right seating plan can inspire collaboration among employees in the workplace.

6. Open Areas for Much Needed Breaks

There is a need to have open areas where workers can have informal meetings, socialise, or take breaks from work. They can always come back fresh and revitalised. Socialising is key for office morale and teams that are close tend to work better with each other.

7. Connectivity, Charging, and Personal Devices

Are you letting your employees use personal devices, such as smartphones or tablets to do official work? If you are, be sure their desks or offices provide strategic outlets for charging or plugging the gadgets into the office network or internet.

By taking into account a few of these factors you can greatly improve your team's productivity as well as their general well-being.