Why Acoustics Need a New Strategy for AI, Hybrid Work and Modern Legal Practice

The modern law office may be about to get a lot louder.

Artificial intelligence is already becoming part of everyday legal work. Clio's 2026 Canadian legal trends research reports that 95% of Canadian law firms are using AI in some capacity. Lawyers are using it for research, document drafting, summarization, administrative work and other tasks that once happened almost entirely through a keyboard.

Now another shift is beginning.

We are starting to talk to our technology.

Legal AI platforms are already introducing voice interaction. Vincent by Clio, for example, added desktop voice dictation in 2026, allowing lawyers to speak a prompt rather than type it. For a profession built around lengthy questions, detailed instructions, analysis and context, it is not difficult to see the appeal.

But there is a workplace implication that deserves attention.

What happens when an office already filled with Teams calls, client conversations, hybrid meetings and collaboration adds lawyers regularly talking to AI?

The future law office may contain significantly more speech than the office many firms originally designed.

And that changes the acoustic conversation.

For years, acoustics in legal workplaces have understandably centered on confidentiality and privacy. Those requirements are not going away. But the next generation of acoustic planning needs to address something broader: how do we create environments that support increasingly verbal ways of working without sacrificing concentration, comfort or privacy?

The answer is not simply to make everything quieter.

In fact, sometimes that creates an entirely different problem.

When Quiet Becomes the Problem

I recently spoke with someone responsible for the working environment of a major Canadian law firm. The firm had designed an important work area where sound containment was critical.

The acoustic strategy worked. In fact, it worked too well.

The space became so quiet that people were uncomfortable using it. Rather than experiencing the environment as peaceful and private, employees found the silence unnatural. The firm ultimately had to make adjustments to reduce the degree of sound control and create a more comfortable acoustic experience.

That experience illustrates one of the most important principles of workplace acoustics:

Good acoustics are not about eliminating sound. They are about managing it.

A successful acoustic environment protects conversations that need to remain private, reduces distractions where people need to concentrate and maintains enough ambient sound for the workplace to feel comfortable, active and human.

That balance is particularly important in a law office.

Legal work requires intense concentration, but it also requires conversation. Lawyers confer with colleagues, meet with clients, negotiate, collaborate, participate in virtual meetings and increasingly interact with technology.

The objective should not be to make the workplace silent. The objective should be to make sure the right sounds are happening in the right places.

Sound Is Invisible, but Its Impact Is Not

When planning a law office, the visible elements naturally receive considerable attention. Furniture, lighting, technology, finishes, meeting rooms and workstations can all be evaluated on drawings, renderings and material boards.

Sound is different.

You cannot see a room's acoustics.

Yet you experience them almost immediately.

A beautifully designed glass meeting room may provide visual separation, but if the conversation inside can be understood from the corridor, it is not truly private. A lawyer may have an enclosed office, yet speech may still travel through the ceiling, around the door, through mechanical systems or through gaps within the construction.

In an open or shared area, the challenge may be the opposite. Employees hear too much.

For law firms, acoustics therefore influence far more than comfort. They affect confidentiality, concentration, collaboration, employee experience, client confidence and workplace performance.

As legal workplaces continue to evolve, those factors need to be considered together.

The Problem Isn't Always Volume

When people think about workplace acoustics, they often think about noise.

But good acoustics are not simply about making a space quieter. They are about controlling how sound behaves.

Consider an empty room with hard floors, exposed ceilings and glass walls. Clap your hands and you may hear the sound linger.

That lingering sound is reverberation. Reverberation time is essentially a measure of how long it takes sound to decay within a space after the original sound has stopped.

The longer sound remains in the room, the more conversations, ringing phones, footsteps and everyday workplace sounds begin to overlap. A room with excessive reverberation can therefore feel busy and noisy even when relatively few people are using it.

This is especially relevant in legal environments because so much of the work depends on concentration and clear communication.

Drafting a complex agreement while hearing several understandable conversations nearby is difficult. Conducting a sensitive client discussion in a room where speech carries into adjacent areas presents a different, and potentially more serious, challenge.

At the other end of the spectrum, removing too much ambient sound can create an environment that feels unnaturally quiet.

In a space with almost no background sound, very small noises become prominent. A keyboard. A chair moving. Footsteps. A cough. A single conversation.

People may also become more conscious of their own voices. Instead of feeling private, they may speak more quietly because the silence makes it seem as though everyone around them can hear every word.

The best acoustic environment, therefore, is not necessarily the quietest one. It is the one that feels appropriate for the work happening within it. A private client meeting room, an open work area, a library-style focus zone and an active collaboration area should not all sound the same.

Noise Has a Workplace Cost

The effect of sound on concentration should not be underestimated.

BuzziSpace, a manufacturer specializing in workplace acoustic solutions, cites workplace research indicating that 50% of workers report being more productive in a less noisy environment, more than 70% frequently lose concentration, and 44% say their company does nothing to address noise.

Those numbers take on particular significance in a legal environment.

Legal work often requires extended periods of focused reading, research, writing, analysis and strategic thinking. Unlike a brief interruption, an understandable conversation nearby can continually compete for attention.

Our brains naturally process speech, which makes a colleague's conversation considerably harder to ignore than indistinct background sound.

This is why a workplace can look beautiful, function efficiently on a floor plan and still frustrate the people working within it every day.

Acoustic performance is part of workplace performance.

A Simple Framework: Absorb, Block and Contain

Workplace acoustics can quickly become technical, but law firm leaders and administrators do not need to become acoustic engineers to ask better questions.

A useful place to begin is with three concepts: absorb, block and contain.

1. Absorb

Absorption helps reduce the amount of sound reflecting around a space.

Hard materials such as glass, concrete and other highly reflective surfaces allow sound energy to bounce around a room. Softer, absorptive materials help capture some of that energy instead.

Acoustic ceiling products, wall panels, upholstered furniture, carpet and other sound-absorbing materials can all contribute. This can be particularly important in larger collaborative rooms, cafés, reception areas and meeting spaces where multiple hard surfaces may otherwise cause sound to linger.

There is, however, an important distinction.

Absorbing sound within a room is not the same as preventing sound from leaving the room.

Adding acoustic panels may make a meeting room sound considerably better inside without necessarily making the conversation taking place within it private.

Understanding that difference is one reason identifying the actual acoustic problem should always come before choosing the solution.

2. Block

Blocking is about interrupting the path sound takes between people or spaces.

In open environments, partitions, screens, furniture, architectural elements and thoughtful space planning can help reduce the direct transmission of sound.

This is one reason workstation orientation and adjacency matter.

If employees who spend much of their day on video calls, or eventually voice interactions with AI, are positioned directly beside people performing concentration-heavy legal work, the problem may not be solved by adding more absorptive material.

Sometimes the better solution is to reconsider the relationship between those activities.

Vertical acoustic elements, suspended panels, room dividers and desk screens can also help interrupt sound paths and reduce how far speech travels through an open area.

3. Contain

Containment becomes particularly important when privacy matters.

Private offices, meeting rooms, interview rooms and other spaces used for sensitive discussions need to do more than absorb sound. They need to help keep speech within the room.

That means considering the complete enclosure, including:

• Walls
• Doors
• Glass
• Ceilings
• Seals
• Mechanical systems
• Electrical and other penetrations

A high-performing wall can still be compromised by a poorly sealed door. Sound may travel above a suspended ceiling or through openings created for mechanical, electrical or technology systems.

Acoustic privacy is therefore rarely determined by one product. The room needs to perform as a system.

4. Diffusion: Managing Reflected Sound

Another principle used in acoustic design is diffusion.

Rather than absorbing sound, diffusion helps distribute sound energy more evenly throughout a space. Irregular surfaces, varying depths and three-dimensional forms can help break up strong sound reflections instead of allowing those reflections to travel directly back into the room.

This can help create a more balanced acoustic environment without making a space feel acoustically "dead."

For most law firm administrators, however, the most important point is not the terminology. It is understanding that different acoustic problems require different acoustic solutions.

A room with excessive reverberation does not necessarily have the same problem as a room with poor speech privacy. An open work area with distracting conversations does not require the same solution as a confidential client meeting room. A space that feels uncomfortably silent requires a different response again.

Understanding the problem first is essential.

Start With the Work, Not the Product

Before deciding what acoustic treatment a workplace needs, consider what will actually happen in each area.

A law office contains very different kinds of work. A litigation team collaborating on a matter has different requirements from someone reviewing a complex agreement. A café intended to encourage conversation should not perform acoustically like a private office. A client meeting room requires a different degree of speech privacy from an informal touchdown space.

Now add another question: Where will people talk to their technology?

If voice interaction with AI becomes an ordinary part of legal work, it will add another layer to workplace planning. A five-minute spoken prompt may not seem significant. Multiply it across dozens or hundreds of people, alongside video meetings and phone calls, and the acoustic profile of the office begins to change.

Think about the workplace in terms of acoustic zones.

Where will people need:

• Deep concentration?
• Confidential conversations?
• Telephone and video calls?
• Voice interaction with technology?
• Team collaboration?
• Informal conversations?
• Client meetings?
• Quiet individual work?

Then consider what is located beside those areas.

Many workplace acoustic problems are actually adjacency problems.

A high-energy collaboration area immediately outside private offices will naturally create challenges. So will a busy café beside rooms intended for sensitive client conversations. Employees spending much of the day on calls beside a quiet focus area create another predictable conflict.

Good acoustic design therefore begins before an acoustic product is ever selected.

It begins with the floor plan and an understanding of how people actually work.

Part 2 to follow

With three decades of experience in the industry, Dave Turner's successful track record as a corporate leader demonstrates the ability to maintain long term, mutually beneficial relationships with CTI's clients. Dave has a broad background as a consulting professional and senior-level executive on personal and organizational development, strategic planning, and change implementation at CTI.

Dave is happy to answer any questions you may have about the services or products offered by CTI Working Environments.