Few workplace debates have shifted as dramatically as flexible working over the past six years.

Before 2020, flexibility in the workplace could mean anything from adjusted hours and part-time arrangements to accommodating caring responsibilities. The pandemic put one particular form of flexibility firmly in the spotlight: where we work. Homeworking became widespread almost overnight, hybrid models followed, and the number of days spent in the office quickly became shorthand for a much broader conversation about workplace flexibility.

Six years later, that conversation is shifting again.

Some employers have increased office requirements, while others continue to offer significant choice over where and when people work. The debate has become remarkably polarised too, with some of the UK’s most prominent business leaders taking strong positions.

In July this year, Boohoo CEO Dan Finley told the company’s 1,500 head-office employees to return to the office five days a week, saying staff should not be “sat in bed wearing grey tracksuit bottoms”. His argument went beyond productivity. He pointed to collaboration, learning from colleagues and the importance of employees “living and breathing” Manchester as reasons for bringing people back together. The Independent reported on the move here.

It is a striking example, but it also highlights an important distinction. Flexible working is not simply another term for working from home. Where somebody works is part of the conversation, but so are when they work, how much autonomy they have and whether their working arrangements can adapt when circumstances change.

And that brings the debate much closer to what we are hearing across the legal profession. It’s against that backdrop, we wanted to know what legal professionals themselves actually think.

So, how many days in the office is the sweet spot?

We recently asked our legal network a straightforward question: how many days working in the office is the sweet spot?

Of 327 people who voted, 46% chose one or two days a week. A further 27% opted for three days, while 19% wanted to work fully remotely. At the other end of the scale, just 5% selected full-time office working.

On the face of it, that looks like a fairly emphatic vote for hybrid working. We then followed the poll with individual conversations, however, and those responses tell a much more interesting story.

One person actually preferred the office because home was somewhere they wanted to protect as family space. Another was happy to attend once or twice a week but felt their commute made more frequent attendance difficult. Parents talked about fitting work around their children, while others focused less on the number of days and more on having the autonomy to decide where they could work most effectively.

Perhaps most tellingly, one respondent put culture and personality fit ahead of working location altogether. Their view was that when the relationship between firm and employee works well, flexibility tends to follow from both sides.

That feels much closer to the flexible working conversation we are having with candidates today.

Flexible working does not simply mean working from home

Somewhere along the way, flexible working and homeworking have become almost interchangeable terms. Yet they are not the same thing, and treating flexibility as a simple question of “how many days are you in?” risks overlooking what legal professionals actually value.

Flexibility can mean hybrid or remote working, but it can also mean different start and finish times, part-time hours, compressed hours, job sharing or greater choice around office days. Sometimes it simply means having enough autonomy to deal with circumstances outside work without unnecessary friction.

Our recent conversations illustrate that particularly well. The respondent with young children was not simply asking to work from home. They valued being able to organise parts of their working day around family responsibilities. The commuter was not opposed to office working either, but five journeys each week changed the equation. Another person actively preferred being in the office because it created a clear boundary between work and home.

The Law Society’s June 2026 research into flexible working takes a similarly broad view. Its definition includes flexible start and finish times, hybrid and remote working, part-time hours and job sharing. The research found that flexible working has become a core expectation for many solicitors, but also that experiences vary significantly across the profession.

That distinction matters for firms reviewing their proposition. A generous hybrid policy does not necessarily make a firm flexible, just as expecting people in the office several days each week does not automatically make it inflexible.

Perhaps the more useful question is whether people have appropriate autonomy within a framework that still works for clients, colleagues and the business.

The legal backdrop is changing too

There is another reason for firms to keep flexible working on the agenda as we head towards 2027.

Employees have had a statutory right to request flexible working from their first day of employment since April 2024. The Employment Rights Act 2025 will strengthen that framework further, with changes due to come into force in 2027. Under the new provisions, employers will need to consider whether refusing a statutory flexible working request on one of the existing business grounds is reasonable. They will also need to explain their reasoning when they refuse a request.

The Government has also consulted during 2026 on the process employers should follow when they cannot immediately agree a request.

For law firms, however, statutory compliance is only one part of the picture. The bigger recruitment question is what flexibility looks like within their own business and whether that proposition remains competitive in the market.

What our Salary Survey tells us

Our own 2026 Salary Survey and Market Insights Report adds further weight to that conversation.

When we asked legal professionals who were unlikely to consider moving roles what kept them where they were, good work/life balance came out on top, selected by 64% of respondents. Working arrangements, including home, flexible and hybrid working, followed at 56%, while culture and work environment were selected by 48%.

By comparison, just 14% cited their firm’s benefits package.

There has also been a shift in why people leave. Better work/life balance was cited by 17.5% of respondents who had left their previous role, up from 12.6% last year. Salary and benefits, meanwhile, fell as a primary reason for moving from 19.2% to 11.4%.

None of this suggests that salary has stopped mattering. Far from it. What it does suggest is that legal professionals increasingly assess the whole proposition when deciding whether to stay or move. Pay sits alongside the work itself, progression, leadership, culture and the way a role fits around the rest of somebody’s life.

Flexibility forms part of that equation, rather than representing the whole equation.

Why firms are pushing back

There are also perfectly legitimate reasons why law firms may want their people together more often, and any useful conversation about flexible working needs to acknowledge them.

Legal careers develop through more than formal training. Junior lawyers learn by listening to conversations, asking quick questions and watching experienced colleagues deal with clients and difficult situations. Supervision can be easier face to face, while collaboration, team relationships and spontaneous knowledge sharing can prove harder to recreate when people rarely work together physically.

Client requirements matter too. What works well for one practice area, team or level of seniority may not translate neatly to another. A blanket approach to flexibility can therefore create its own challenges, particularly if firms struggle to balance individual preferences with supervision, service delivery and team cohesion.

Equally, asking someone to undertake a lengthy commute simply to spend the day working independently or joining virtual calls can be difficult to justify. Mandated office attendance arguably works best when people understand what they gain from being there.

That shifts the question away from simply how many days should people be in the office? towards something more useful: what do we want office time to achieve?

Flexibility as a recruitment and retention issue

This is where the conversation becomes particularly relevant to recruitment.

A firm offering two days in the office will not automatically beat a competitor asking for three if the second opportunity provides better work, clearer progression, stronger leadership or a culture that suits the candidate. Our follow-up conversations make that particularly clear.

But rigid working requirements can narrow a firm’s candidate pool before those other qualities ever enter the conversation. For an experienced lawyer considering several opportunities, an additional two days of commuting each week may carry a meaningful cost in both money and time. For somebody with caring responsibilities, the issue may be whether the firm’s working arrangements make the role practical at all.

Our Salary Survey found flexibility influencing attraction and retention across several of the practice areas where experienced candidates remain difficult to secure. That does not mean firms need to offer whatever arrangement a candidate requests. It does mean working arrangements have become part of the overall value proposition, alongside salary, progression, quality of work and culture.

The strongest approach is therefore unlikely to be simply “more flexibility”. It is clarity about what a firm can offer, why its model works that way and where there is genuine room for individual choice.

Is offering flexibility your biggest flex heading into 2027?

Probably not on its own.

After several years in which working practices changed at extraordinary speed, we may finally be reaching a more nuanced stage of the conversation. Fully remote, hybrid and predominantly office-based models can all work. Equally, each can fail if the structure does not suit the team, the work or the people involved.

For law firms, the opportunity heading into 2027 is not necessarily to offer the fewest office days. It is to think more carefully about what flexibility actually means within their organisation.

• Can people adjust their working patterns when circumstances require it?
• Is office attendance purposeful?
• Do managers apply policies consistently?
• Can junior lawyers still access the supervision and development they need?
• And, importantly, does the firm’s approach help rather than hinder its ability to attract and retain the people it wants?

For candidates, the same nuance matters. A headline number of homeworking days tells you relatively little about how flexible a firm really is, or whether the role, culture and management style will work for you.

If our poll and the conversations that followed tell us anything, it is that the “sweet spot” is not necessarily a number.

It is finding a working arrangement that works for the individual, the team and the firm.

About Clayton Legal

Clayton Legal is a specialist legal recruitment consultancy with more than 27 years’ experience supporting law firms and legal professionals across England and Wales. We work with firms of all sizes across our specialist practice areas, helping them attract, recruit and retain the people they need to build successful teams.

Our annual Salary Survey and Market Insights Report draws on data and conversations from across the legal profession to provide a clearer picture of salaries, benefits, working arrangements and the factors influencing career decisions.

If you are reviewing your firm’s approach to flexible working, benchmarking your wider employee proposition or considering your next hire, our specialist consultants can provide insight into what we are seeing and hearing across the market.