Working out of empty office space

There are times when setting up in the hotel for your war room space just won’t work out. It could be that they have already booked up all of their conference rooms or they can’t provide any bandwidth. Another possibility is that the hotel is just too far from the court and your team wants to work closer in proximity. A whole new adventure awaits! Time to look for some space.

I have been down this rabbit hole a few times. Getting some space you can work with could require persistence and patience. On the other hand, you might just stumble across the perfect setup right out of the gate. There might be a company that has set up workspace and contracts with law firms for blocks of time, and this might be just what you need. If you find something like this, you may discover that they already have a network set up, facilities for all of your equipment and space for the team to eat. If you don’t come across something like that, you’ll be looking for space to rent on a short term basis.

I’ve looked at buildings that were obviously unused for quite some time. I’ve been in old buildings with not much in regards to available electricity and certainly no internet set up in them. I have also set up a few war rooms in buildings that used to house businesses of one type or another and found it to be relatively easy to get things going. Empty bank buildings, older office buildings, heck I have even set up in church meeting space.

The thing is, when you have to set up space like this, you have to have enough imagination to be able to see how it can transform into usable work space. The other thing is the team will have to be flexible and understand that they aren’t working back at the office. I have seen places that didn’t look like much at first turn out to be pretty good war rooms.

Costs might be a little higher than working out of a conference room at the hotel. You’re probably going to have to turn on all of the utilities, and there will be deposits and possibly higher rates considering the short term nature. That might especially be true of the internet access. I have found a lot of companies that provide internet access are less willing to provide one or two months of service. Again, you might have to use some imagination with this problem. One time, I had to agree to pay for one year of internet access even though we were only going to use it for three weeks. I paid the setup fee, which was not much to speak of, and 12 months of service. I didn’t even blink. Those costs for what amounts to short term internet access (it was decent bandwidth too, like 15MB) were a “no brainer” for my team to be successful at trial.

All I’m getting at is that setting up in raw space can be an adventure and will probably need you to be imaginative and flexible. Having enough power for all of your equipment could be challenging. Your Ethernet cables may be taped down along the floor with gaffers tape. It can be done though.