Office pods for law firms

You know your obligations. We will stick to what we know.

Legal professional privilege and your confidentiality duties under the SRA Code of Conduct are your territory, not ours, and a supplier explaining them back to you would be insulting. What we can usefully contribute is the part of the problem that is physical and measurable: how much of a conversation actually leaves an enclosure, how that is tested, and what number is worth asking any supplier for.

The one connection worth drawing is that the duty is framed around keeping client affairs confidential, and what is reasonable in practice is assessed against what was available to you. In an open-plan floor, a physical enclosure is one of a very small number of practical controls, and unlike most of the others it is visible to a client walking through your office.

None of the above is legal advice, and you would rightly ignore it if we pretended otherwise.

What confidential requires, acoustically

This is the part most firms have never had explained properly, and it changes what you should buy.

You do not need silence. You need unintelligibility. A conversation that can be heard as a murmur but not followed word for word is confidential in the sense that matters. That is a much more achievable target than soundproofing, and it is measured differently.

The standard written for pods is ISO 23351-1, which tests the assembled pod with its door closed, seals engaged and ventilation running, and reports a single speech level reduction figure. A FocusPod is laboratory tested at greater than 29 dB under it. In a normal office, where background noise sits around 55 to 65 dB(A) and speech is about 60 dB(A) at a metre, that reduction puts a conversation inside the pod below the room's own noise floor, which is the point at which it stops being followable.

Be wary of any supplier quoting an impressive decibel number without naming the standard behind it. An Rw rating describes a wall assembly in a laboratory, not a finished pod with a door, a seal and an air path. The two are not comparable and the difference is not academic.

Where firms actually put them

Remote hearings and conferences with counsel. The single fastest-growing reason firms buy pods. A remote hearing joined from an open-plan desk is bad on every axis: the audio picks up the floor, the background is your office, and the confidentiality position is uncomfortable. A pod gives a controlled acoustic, a neutral backdrop and a door.

Client calls from open plan. Particularly for associates and juniors who have no office to retreat to and who make up most of the call volume in any firm.

Witness and client preparation. Long, sensitive, and impossible to hold at a desk. A four or six-person model does this properly.

Supervision and difficult conversations. Appraisals, file reviews and the conversation a supervising partner needs to have without an audience.

Information barriers. Where teams working opposite sides of a matter share a floor, physical separation for calls is a practical support to whatever screening arrangements you already have in place. It does not replace them and we would not claim it does.

Count those uses rather than counting fee earners. Most firms need fewer pods than they expect and a better mix of sizes than they expect.

The inside matters as much as the outside

Two things firms notice that nobody mentions before purchase. The first is that a small hard-surfaced box sounds awful on a video call even when it is acoustically private, because sound bounces between parallel walls and voices come across boxy. That is what the absorbent interior lining is for, and it is why a pod with good insulation and no interior treatment is a bad pod for legal work specifically, where being clearly understood on a hearing or deposition is the whole point.

The second is ventilation. A two-hour conference in an unventilated box is unpleasant by the forty-minute mark and people stop using it. Adjustable ventilation is standard on every model, and the acoustic figure we quote was measured with it running rather than switched off.

Dimmable lighting with adjustable colour temperature is standard too, which matters more than it sounds when someone is on camera for three hours.

The building, the lease and the listed façade

Firm offices tend to be in managed buildings with real procedure attached: a permit to work, a site induction for installers, insurance documentation, and often an out-of-hours delivery window. All of that is routine for us. Send us your building's requirements with the enquiry and we deal with them directly with the building manager. A good number of firms also sit in period or listed buildings where the goods lift is small or absent, and there we measure the route rather than just the room.

The part that usually settles the decision: a FocusPod is freestanding. It sits on levelling feet, is not fixed to the structure, needs no building work, no landlord consent and no making good at the end of the term. For a firm holding a lease it will not necessarily renew, a room that can be unbolted and taken to the next office is a materially different proposition from one that stays behind.

Every model, priced

Published, so you can build a business case without a sales conversation first. Furniture and installation are separate lines. The calculator below will also show the first-year tax effect if you enter your rate.

Prices are for the pod in the configuration you choose. Finishes, furniture and compatible extras are listed separately as you build. Delivery, destination costs and any applicable tax are confirmed on your order summary, so the total you approve is the total you pay.

What is included as standard

Every FocusPod arrives with laminated glass front and rear, layered acoustic insulation, adjustable ventilation, dimmable LED lighting with adjustable colour temperature, power and an occupancy light. Speech level reduction is laboratory tested at greater than 29 dB under ISO 23351-1, the international standard written specifically for pods. Every pod is covered by our five-year structural and electrical warranty.

There is no separate charge for the black or white exterior or for the standard interior palette. Other exterior colours use the displayed upgrade price, and a custom interior colour is priced per pod. All of it is listed separately as you build, so nothing arrives as a surprise on your order.

See it properly before you decide

Take a look inside. The film below walks through the Solo, the most compact model in the range, and the 3D configurator lets you turn any model around, change the finishes and try the furniture layouts. If you would rather be walked through it, we will do a live video walkthrough of the pod you are considering and answer questions as we go.

Questions from practice managers

Start with the conversations that have nowhere to go

Count them for a week. That number, not your fee earner count, tells you how many pods you need and which sizes. Then build the configuration, see the price, and send us the floor plan and building requirements with your enquiry.