Washington Lawyer July/August 2026
By Michael Gips
A lawyer leaves a federal building in downtown Washington, D.C., as the sun goes down. The matter she is working on has drawn national media coverage and online commentary, the kind that straddles critique and provocation. She adjusts her route home, scans the sidewalk, and avoids taking a call about the case until she enters her apartment building.
Not long ago, such precautions might have seemed excessive. Today, for many lawyers in the District, they are no longer a rare exception.
The change is not driven by a single incident or actor. It reflects a shift in how legal work is perceived and experienced in the nation's capital. Lawyers are more visible, the matters they handle are more publicly contested, and the boundary between professional advocacy and personal exposure has become less distinct. These dynamics are reshaping how lawyers work and how law firms must think about their responsibilities to those who carry out that work.
At its core, this is a question of duty of care.
High-Exposure Environment
Washington has always been a city where law, policy, advocacy, and public debate converge. What has changed is the degree to which legal work and the lawyers performing it are pulled into that maelstrom.
Public reporting has documented a rise in threats against members of the judiciary and government officials, a trend noted by media outlets, including NPR and NBC News. The 2022 attempted attack on U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in which an individual crossed the country to break into the justice's home and kill him, was widely seen as an extraordinary event. In retrospect, it also reflected a broader shift: Legal decisions can trigger intensely personal reactions that move beyond the courtroom.
More recently, members of the federal judiciary, including judges based in the District of Columbia, have warned of a sustained increase in violent threats tied to high-profile rulings. Through the first four months of 2026, the U.S. Marshals Service has reported threats to 292 federal judges, compared to 396 judges in all of 2025.
Attorneys involved in politically or socially charged litigation have also reported harassment and threatening communications, some of which extend beyond online commentary into real-world awareness and unwanted contact. While many of these incidents do not escalate further, they reflect a pattern in which legal work can generate increasingly personal attention. In fact, protesters now sometimes treat law firms as proxies for the causes espoused by their clients, viewing them as complicit in the behavior they denounce. D.C. firms representing defense contractors, Israeli interests, gender-affirming care advocates and opponents, and other controversial organizations have been targeted by both in-person demonstrations and online harassment.
Adjacency Risk for Law Firms
Law firms may not be the primary targets in these incidents, but they are rarely far removed from them. Although organizations don't face the same risks as individuals, such threats reflect a broader environment in which legal actors are increasingly treated as proxies for contested outcomes. For large law firms, that environment is not abstract. It follows the work. A firm representing a client in a regulatory investigation, constitutional challenge, Article II adjudication, sanctions matter, or other high-profile engagement may find that the visibility of the issue transfers to the lawyers involved.
Gone are the days when identifying lawyers' names on filings meant combing through courthouse records. Court filings, instantly accessible online, identify counsel. Ubiquitous news and social media coverage names firms. Online commentary often goes further, attaching individuals to positions they are professionally obligated to advance. In the District, where many matters carry national implications, that exposure is amplified. Visibility is a byproduct of the job.
For large law firms, exposure begins with the matter. Legal work tied to high-stakes issues such as government enforcement, politically salient litigation, corporate crises, or advocacy on contentious topics can generate attention that extends well beyond the courtroom. That attention may manifest as heightened visibility, persistent scrutiny, or unwanted contact. But in some cases, it escalates.
The risk travels across teams, practice groups, and offices. Attorneys may find themselves publicly associated with matters that attract strong reactions. Staff may encounter unfamiliar individuals seeking access to firm spaces. Routine professional activity may occur in environments where others involved in the same matter face elevated risk.
Security professionals sometimes describe this dynamic as adjacency risk: exposure that arises not from being the primary target, but from proximity to those who are. For law firms, adjacency is built into the system. Lawyers work alongside clients, policymakers, investigators, and executives whose roles may attract attention or hostility. They are present in the same spaces, associated with the same matters, and visible at the same moments.
Limits of Traditional Security Models
Historically, law firm security has been anchored in facilities, with some matters also involving human resources and operations. Common-area video surveillance, access control systems, visitor management procedures, evacuation routes, and coordination with building security have formed the core of most programs. Those measures remain essential, but they may no longer be sufficient.
The risks firms confront today are less about where lawyers work and more about where their work takes them. Attorneys move between offices, courthouses, client sites, government buildings, hotels, and public venues. Post-COVID hybrid work means that attorneys sit with their laptops in lobbies and coffee shops. Such environments are designed for accessibility, not control. Yet the expectation is that firms have considered the risks associated with them.
The convergence of digital and physical exposure has created new considerations. Publicly available information can be aggregated to identify where lawyers live, how they commute, and where they are likely to be at given times. That information may come, sometimes inadvertently, from an attorney's firm or family. A daughter who posts that her attorney parents will be attending her high school volleyball game, for example, provides a time and place where they can be confronted. Online criticism can evolve into more personalized attention.
Today, security is less about perimeter defense and more about understanding how exposure originates and how it travels. In sum, several patterns are emerging across large firms.
First, visibility has become a risk multiplier. Public filings, open proceedings, and accessible information increase exposure for those involved. Lawyers who once operated largely behind the scenes now find themselves more easily identifiable.
Second, risk is increasingly distributed. It can arise in one context and surface in another: an online exchange that leads to in-person recognition, a contentious matter that prompts unusual inquiries, a routine interaction that feels out of place only in hindsight.
Third, the boundary between professional and personal space is more permeable. Information about attorneys is widely available, and once it circulates, it can be difficult to contain. Firms are recognizing that safety cannot be separated neatly from the environments in which their personnel live and move. Most risks do not result in incidents, but they shape how lawyers travel, communicate, and assess their safety.
What Firms Are Doing Now
Across large firms, responses to this environment are becoming more varied, and in many cases, protections aren't highly visible.
One area of focus is situational awareness and personal safety. Firms are expanding training beyond emergency response to include everyday behaviors: recognizing unfamiliar individuals in office spaces, managing interactions that feel out of place, and adjusting routines when working late or moving between locations. The goal is to reduce uncertainty about how to respond when something does not feel right. Firms have also been adding duress buttons to reception desks, managing partner offices, and other critical areas. Further, they are designating, stocking, and reinforcing office space for shelter-in-place purposes.
Hybrid work patterns have introduced a related challenge. Many offices are only partially occupied on a given day, and personnel who rotate in and out of the workplace may be less familiar with emergency procedures, evacuation routes, or available resources such as panic buttons and shelter-in-place protocols. Infrequent presence can erode institutional muscle memory. Firms are finding that training and communication need to account for that reality, reinforcing expectations not just once, but repeatedly, and in formats that reach attorneys and staff wherever they are working.
Within offices, firms are revisiting access control and visitor management. Measures that once relied heavily on trust are being supplemented with clearer protocols: ensuring that guests are escorted, limiting movement between floors or practice areas, and reducing opportunities for unauthorized individuals to blend into the environment. In some cases, firms are implementing more granular, in-suite access controls.
Firms are also working more closely with "base building" management and, in some cases, with other tenants to align security practices in shared environments. In multi-tenant buildings, front-of-house security is owned by the building and thus not fully within any tenant's control, so effectiveness depends on how clearly roles and expectations are defined. Firms are weighing in on guard deployment and coordinating security with building front-desk personnel, including placing a firm representative in the lobby to manage firm-specific visitor screening and access control.
They are also evaluating how movement is controlled at and beyond the lobby: elevator access and floor restrictions that can limit where an unauthorized individual can go once inside, as well as measures such as full-height optical turnstiles that reduce tailgating and ensure that access decisions made at reception are enforced. In some buildings, this also includes coordination on how elevator systems are used during emergencies, including options to restrict movement or support shelter-in-place protocols. Panic buttons, camera coverage, and lighting in and around office entrances remain part of this review.
Some firms are even extending their safety efforts to mail handling and package screening. Relocating or restructuring these functions can reduce exposure without significantly affecting operations.
Another area of attention is digital and social media hygiene. Firms are helping lawyers understand how professional biographies, social media activity, and commercial data sources can be combined to create detailed personal profiles. In response, many are offering guidance on limiting exposure, removing sensitive data where possible, and recognizing when online attention may warrant escalation.
Historically, responsibility for security has often resided within facilities or operations. Increasingly, security is intersecting with leadership and governance. Decisions about sensitive matters may now go beyond legal and reputational considerations, extending to questions about exposure and preparedness. Supporting attorneys who experience harassment may involve coordination across human resources, legal, communications, and external partners. Determining when to involve law enforcement can require judgment beyond operational protocols.
Approaches vary across firms. Some have designated security professionals; others are clarifying roles and escalation paths. Still others are engaging external expertise to assess risks and develop more structured programs. Security is becoming less of a discrete operational concern and more of a governance issue.
Duty of Care Going Forward
Under Section 5(a)(1) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, employers have long owed a duty to provide a reasonably safe workplace. For visible roles, the possibility of workplace violence or harassment is a foreseeable risk.
Duty of care is about alignment: ensuring that policies, training, and leadership expectations reflect the realities of the environment. If lawyers begin to weigh personal risk more heavily in deciding which matters to take on, the effects may be subtle but significant. Certain types of work may become harder to staff. Pro bono representation may be affected in ways that are difficult to quantify but important to acknowledge.
At the same time, firms that address these issues thoughtfully may strengthen their ability to support their people and carry out their work effectively.
Law firms have long excelled at managing legal, financial, and reputational risk. The emerging challenge is how to integrate security into that same framework without losing the openness that defines the profession. For most firms, the path forward is not dramatic transformation.
It involves clarifying ownership, establishing governance, and ensuring that practices reflect modern realities.
The District will continue to concentrate the pressures that shape the profession. The opportunity has arisen for firms to meet those pressures as organizations responsible for the safety and well-being of their people.
D.C. Bar member Michael Gips is managing director for enterprise security risk management at Kroll. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School.
