Editorial: presenteeism is the metric of firms that do not know how to measure

There is a simple test to find out whether a firm has a presenteeism problem: ask what would happen if its best lawyer left on time every day. If the answer is a vague unease, an objectless suspicion or a raised eyebrow, the firm does not measure work: it measures obedience. And in 2026, with the legal talent market more contested than it has been in a decade, measuring obedience is an expensive way to lose people.

The original confusion

Presenteeism is born from an honest confusion that becomes a vice: identifying dedication with presence. In a craft profession like the law, presence made sense as a signal of commitment when work was in-person by nature. But today's legal output (documents, analysis, negotiation, matter management) is measurable far more precisely than twenty years ago, and technology allows working from anywhere at the same quality. Persisting with the chair as the metric is no longer tradition: it is not having done the management homework.

The cost is not abstract. Presenteeism penalises exactly those who add the most value per hour (the efficient, the organised, the ones who solve) and rewards whoever turns the day into a long, low-intensity shift. In the medium term, the former leave and the latter get promoted. It is perfect adverse selection, and it is happening in firms that believe themselves demanding when they are in fact imprecise.

What presenteeism is not

It is worth defusing the argument of convenience: opposing presenteeism is not opposing high standards. The law has real peaks, closings that cannot wait and hearings that cannot be postponed; misunderstood flexibility that ignores that reality is as damaging as the presenteeism that denies it. The difference lies in who decides and with what criteria: in healthy teams, intensity is exceptional, visible and compensated; in toxic ones, it is structural, invisible and free.

Digital presenteeism does not help either, that mutation which replaced the chair with the 23:47 message carrying an expectation of immediate reply. Digital disconnection at law firms is not a concession to staff: it is the boundary between real urgency and the badly managed anxiety of whoever is in charge.

The fact that demolishes the excuse

Presenteeism's final argument is always the same: "it is like this because clients demand it". False. Clients demand responsiveness, quality and precision on deadlines, three things that depend on team design, not on the chair. Firms that have implemented objective-based work have not lost clients: they have gained margin, because the efficiency that used to evaporate in dead hours now becomes capacity. The definitive proof is that the firms with the best internal culture reputations are, year after year, the same ones leading the talent attraction rankings. It is not coincidence: it is causality.

Who can change it

The temptation is to look to the legislator or the market, but presenteeism is dismantled in much more modest instances: in the partner who evaluates by results and shows it, in the practice head who thanks efficiency instead of suspecting it, in the people department that measures what matters. And also in the lawyers themselves, who when they have options (and today they do) vote with their feet with more information than ever: reviews, salary studies and conversations between generations do the rest.

Firms competing for talent have already understood: they offer remote work with serious frameworks, evaluation by verifiable objectives and an adult conversation about workload. Those that have not will keep wondering why their best lawyers change firms "for no reason". The reason is usually in plain sight: it is the one they refused to measure.