D.C. office move for Covington is sign of how law firms’ push to become more efficient is impacting D.C. real estate

D.C. office move for Covington is sign of how law firms’ push to become more efficient is impacting D.C. real estate

December 11, 2014, The Washington Post

The firm is featured in this article from The Washington Post regarding its recent move to CityCenter in Washington, D.C.:

When Tim Hester began his career as a young lawyer at Covington & Burling in 1983, the one spot in the office he was sure to bump into his fellow associates was the firm’s law library, an expansive collection of legal encyclopedias and texts that took up an entire floor of Covington’s previous office on Pennsylvania Avenue. 

“When I started here, there were no computers in lawyers’ offices,” said Hester, who is now the chairman of the 850-attorney law firm. “The central hub was the library, that’s where you’d see people all day.” 

Over time, as technology evolved, the library — like that at most corporate law firms — shrank dramatically. The library at Covington’s new headquarters at CityCenter, which the firm moved into this week, is about a third the size of the library at the firm’s previous location. That left the question of how to design a new type of communal space that made sense in the modern era.