Cultural shift
Tech startup shakes up the workplace.
This room, on the third floor of a stately downtown office building, sat silent for more than 15 years.
Now, a cowbell rings thrice daily, ushering in a flurry of activity that can grow so loud it annoys the neighbors across the hall. Those neighbors — one of the city’s bestknown criminal defense attorneys, Mike DeGeurin, and his storied firm Foreman, DeGeurin & DeGeurin — aren’t used to sharing space with an office where a worker may be playing Nintendo.
This is what happens when a tech startup replaces a law library in a small, corner building, where quarters are close and tradition is being overthrown by a new generation of up-andcomers who’ve challenged the very definition of white-collar workers by showing up daily in flannel and T-shirts.
“We’ve become emblematic of the technology that is replacing the elegance,” said Rosemary Ruths, director of finance and operations at Ruths.ai, the Houston data-analytics firm that in January leased 2,500 square feet of office space that had previously been home to DeGeurin’s law library.
Before this year, row upon row of thick legal books lined the beautiful brick walls of this office. They’re gone now — replaced with dual-monitor computer terminals perched atop sleek adjustable desks. And the dignified silence has been replaced with the whirring of a single-cup coffee maker, the sound of cheering during regular board-game battles and, yes, the cowbell.
It’s a study in contrasts, as a firm full of data dudes who work in the cloud and play in the office moves in next door to an old-school legacy law firm. National trend
Across the nation, legal firms are gutting their libraries. The reasons are obvious: Though law books were traditionally updated either annually or once every few years, new precedents and case law can be added to digital records instantaneously. Add that to the soaring cost of real estate per square foot, and setting aside an entire room for storing books would make any legal accountant’s blood boil. Still, change isn’t easy. “The idea of the library being the crown-jewel piece of the law firm is something that is no longer a fact,” said Greg Lambert, president of the American Association of Law Libraries. “It was once the fact, though. If you had a client, and you wanted to impress them, you’d walk them through your gorgeous library.”
And DeGeurin’s was impressive. The brick walls were lined with large metal shelves, bearing the weight of dense legal books, perfectly arranged. Every detail of the space was meticulously planned, down to the inlaid wooden floor in the back corner, which DeGeurin had stripped from the firm’s previous home and brought to its location at 300 Main around the turn of the millenium.
“It’s long-leaf pine. And my partner Percy Foreman had taken that on a fee one time,” DeGeurin said.
That kind of deal was common among lawyers during the early days of DeGeurin’s practice, when it was run by the infamous Foreman, who made a national name for himself defending people such as James Earl Ray in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
At one time, Foreman was said to own more than 40 cars, all through fee collections. By the time DeGeurin joined the firm in 1975, those Depressionera deals were growing scarcer. Still, the firm’s stock rose. In the 42 years since joining Foreman’s firm, which DeGeurin took over fully after Foreman’s death in 1988, DeGeurin has represented everyone from Branch Davidians and Enron executives to Clarence Bradley, whom DeGeurin successfully exonerated after years on death row.
Widely considered one of the best lawyers in all of Texas, DeGeurin holds tight to history and tradition. That’s why he’s never removed Foreman’s name from the firm, even as he’s added the name of his son, Michael DeGeurin. As the senior DeGeurin turned over the law-library keys to Ruths.ai in January, he told Ruths all about the long-pine floor. Treat it well, he told her.
When DeGeurin first leased space for his practice at the downtown brownstone, he rented two full floors in case he needed to expand his offices from the third floor down to the second. He abandoned that idea after a few years, and when it became clear that the law library was no longer worth the investment, he worked with his landlord to find a new tenant for part of the third floor.
He’s not alone. A new report by real-estate firm CBRE found that law firms across the country are downsizing their physical spaces. And in Houston, the average firm is shrinking its offices by 27 percent, largely because of rethinking law libraries.
“When I realized I was just storing old books that could not even be used anymore, I realized that was not so smart,” DeGeurin said. He tried selling the books — which usually cost firms between $75 and a few hundred dollars apiece to purchase — but couldn’t find any takers. They’d become relics. Relics
“Their law library was just beautiful. Just solid, huge metal shelves and books,” said Ruths, whose son, Troy Ruths, is Ruths. ai’s CEO and founder. “And that’s a very powerful image to me. Here we are, a data-analytics company — I mean, we’re forefront technology, and we’re very much what is replacing them.” Almost exactly. “I would describe us as a Netflix for analytics,” Troy Ruths said.
“So, like, when you buy a TV, you want to watch things. So you’re going to go and buy content packages for that TV. Cable and things like that,” he explained one Friday morning in October, as he sat in his conference room, just below a giant portrait of R2D2 wearing a cowboy hat.
The same thing works for analytics, he said. When you have the tools to create and inspect data, you need the actual data. And that’s where Ruths. ai comes in. It provides data and helps its users derive meaning from the information available. Mainly, Ruths.ai works with oil-and-gas companies, offering a vast amount of information through a subscription program.
“Really, we’re a library,” said Lucas Wood, the company’s analytics-team lead.
But this doesn’t look or sound like a library.
Someone rings the cowbell for the first time each day at 10:30 a.m., rousing a dozen data scientists and designers from their tasks at hand for 30 minutes of (loosely) organized chaos. Some employees grab Nintendo controllers, others move from their desks to a wellappointed lounge in the center of the space, kicking back into leather sofas and grabbing candy by the handful, or sliding over to one of the nearby tables for a quick board-game tournament.
The employees at Ruths. ai work without interruption or small talk for 90-minute stretches throughout the day. But when the cowbell clangs after that session, it’s time for 30 minutes of downtime — or, at lunch, a full hour. It’s an idea Troy Ruths came up with after his time as a college basketball player.
“In sports, you can’t practice all day because you have a certain amount of physical energy that you can exercise. And I think the same is very true with work environments,” he said. “In sports, we carefully monitor our energy input and output. And as a worker, we don’t. We just show up willynilly, and we make up for any shortcomings with time. So as an employer, I wanted to say, ‘I don’t want you here for longer than those hours you’re supposed to work. But what I do want is consistent, quality work for short-time segments.’ ” Tension
So workers show up at 9 a.m. and leave at 5 p.m. They don’t work weekends, and they don’t chat with each other during the structured work portion of the day. But during the scheduled breaks, they get to decompress however they want.
Lately, that’s included a game called klask — a Scandinavian version of table hockey. It’s been a fast favorite at Ruths.ai, mostly because a full tournament can be wrapped up in less than 30 minutes, and it’s relatively simple to learn. But it can get heated.
“Josh is the king of bank shots,” said Jason May, a junior data scientist, as he allowed a point on his goal. He grabbed the ball and put it back into play, hoping to score against his opponent, junior developer Josh Davidson. The two have set themselves apart from the rest of the pack as some of the most competitive players.
“It’s never gotten to the point where it gets too intense,” May said, leaning into a shot, which Davidson blocked.
“There will definitely be a game-winning exultation,” Davidson said, gliding a magnet around beneath the board. This is how he controls his player up top. “But it’s not like there’s anger or screaming matches or anything.”
He sank another shot and clapped his hands together. It’s loud but hardly a riot.
“The people across the hall, they like to come in and say, ‘What are you laughing at?’ or, ‘Why are you always laughing?’ ” Davidson continued, laughing. “They’re like, ‘This is an office. You’re not supposed to be laughing.’ ”
Those moments have led to some tension between the two sides of the third floor, said Rosemary Ruths, who calls the relationship a “cold war,” complete with passiveaggressive notes posted on the door of the two firms’ shared restrooms.
Not so, said Mike DeGeurin, who dismissed notions of any struggle between the old guard and the young guns with lawyerly flair, saying, “I don’t know anything about that.”
Davidson shrugged off the differences between the two companies, dropped the ball back onto the klask board and laughed again. May joined him, as did a few of their coworkers, watching the game from their couch seats.
“I think we’re a shock,” Rosemary Ruths said. “We’re so different. We’re too loud. We laugh too much. We don’t stay late. It’s just been interesting — the contrast and these people who come in in suits and ties and look like they do, and look how we look.”
She does a Vanna White hand wave over her outfit, which consists of lululemon leggings and an athletic top. Most everyone else is in jeans.
“It’s become emblematic of the way life is moving, away from those elegant, stately, welldressed people that are quiet and reserved,” she said. “It’s like they’re the end of an era.”
And across the hall, at Ruths. ai, is what comes next.