Alcohol in the Office: Yea or Nay?

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1. I never keep alcohol in my office, and my firm prohibits drinking at work. If we have a big win, we leave the office and go somewhere to have celebratory drinks/sodas/mocktails/whatever. I’m probably naive, but I’m surprised to hear there are still firms with this culture. I don’t know of any in my area.

2. I’m torn about this. Every office I have worked on has had some form of alcohol – weekly c**cktail hours, various office functions, toasting to closings with champagne, and partners who host their proteges for scotch in their office on Friday afternoons. I’m fine with alcohol at social functions, but am not a fan of people having drinks in their office/at their workstation/alone and would never do it personally. I find the whole “come into my office for a scotch and we’ll be pals” runs the risk of excluding people who aren’t into that sort of thing. I’ve also seen people trying to sneak in and steal the company-sponsored alcohol to fuel a party with their colleagues, which is not great to say the least. In my previous job, we had a person who was clearly struggling with alcoholism at my office, which had me concerned about our liability when this person was getting dangerously drunk with full company approval.

3. I 100% still hear about this in startup culture. Like the office has a designated “beer fridge.” In my corporate world, people go out for drinks to celebrate; if anyone has booze in their office it’s not on display.

   1. Finance and we have a bar cabinet in one of our offices (the one with the most younger associates)

   2. Real as hell. We have a designated beer & champagne fridge in my tech startup office. The desk across from me has a bottle of bourbon and two beers permanently stationed on it. I don’t drink, but I can’t imagine this can be great for people struggling with addiction.

4. The senior attorneys at my small firm have alcohol in their office they break out for certain occasions. Usually a fancy scotch or whiskey that I will happily take part in when offered. For firm wide celebrations, our office manager runs out for champagne. When I get more senior, I plan to also have a special bottle on hand for special occasions but only to be shared with others. Not to drink alone.

5. I would never keep alcohol in the office for myself, but my whole office did just have a few glasses of company-provided wine at lunch to celebrate good news.

6. My department at my last job (finance) had a communal liquor cabinet and our fridge was more beer than food. Nobody had their own stash in their drawer, and it was inclusive of anyone who felt like joining in, but I think it really helped in our group dynamic – we were all (and still are) close friends despite not working together anymore. It was the best first-job experience I could’ve hoped for, and many of my friends were jealous and also confused at the company culture.

7. We have wine/beer/occasionally scotch in the boardroom on Friday afternoons, and sometimes if you are working very late a glass of wine in your office would be acceptable, but any other drinking in your own office or on other days of the week would raise eyebrows at my firm.

   1. Way back in the late 80s/early 90s, my firm would have drinks in the conference room every Friday afternoon/evening. Good times, man. Good times.

8. At my firm I’d guess there are fewer individual offices without alcohol in them than ones with alcohol

9. Almost every lawyer at my firm has alcohol in their office, both partners and associates. Post 6 pm you can often find a few people gathered for wine or scotch/whatever in the office. However, I do not know anyone who just has a drink alone in their office. The lawyers at my firm also has a standing Friday at 4 pm drinks at a nearby bar.

   1. My law firm does NOT allow alchohol in the office b/c of dram shop rules, which says that the firm is liable if someone gets hurt while drunk. However, the rule, which is based in premises liability, does NOT apply if we go out and someone gets hurt while drunk. So the manageing partner takes us out to the Lamb’s Club or a resturant where he does not hesitate to order champagne or bottles of wine. When I used to work serving subpeenies, all the guys had bottles of cheap liquor in their desk drawers and they always locked their drawers and did NOT share with others.

10. Being in N.O. with a drinking culture, many people have liquor in their offices. I have two bottles of wine and a bottle of bourbon in my office, but haven’t opened any of it. The only time it became a serious issue was when someone insisted on celebrating the end of a big project with sparkling wine when one of our colleagues was an alcoholic who struggled mightily with her sobriety. I told the project manager flat out that it wasn’t appropriate.

11. Moving from big law to in house was definitely a culture change. At the law firm, I’d wager half of people kept some form of nicer liquour in their office and there were weekly happy hours on Fridays and drinks at group and client lunches (although side eye if you had more than two, except when happy hour was after work).
    In house at a company that does building, designing and projects for clients, there is a very strict alcohol policy. The view on safety when you’re responsible for producing real things that could actually get people hurt and not just papers is much different.

12. My law firm office has an entire fridge full of beer and wine (We have 30 attorneys, so this seems like plenty to me). I…. don’t know what to do with it. I’d never drink during the day (because it just doesn’t seem ok to me personally to do client work and have a beer) and if I’m at the office when it’s an appropriate time to drink (say like 6:30 or 7:00 pm and my work is done), then I don’t want to be at work drinking….l want to go home (where maybe I will have a drink). And if I want to have a drink with someone I work with, I’d rather just go to the bar on the first floor of our building and hang out there.

13. I mean, drinking by yourself in your office during the day would definitely be frowned upon, but the majority of the attorneys here keep something in their office, and we have a communal beer/wine fridge and a liquor cabinet. It’s not unusual to partake in small groups after 4pm. And some drink alone in their office after hours.

14. Random related question:

    Does unopened hard liquor go bad (like scotch or bourbon)?

    1. No.

       1. Nor does it go bad once it’s opened.

          1. Spirits, especially barrel-aged spirits, will taste different within 6 months to 2 years of opening. Exposure to oxygen plus alcohol evaporation will make the spirit taste different/ not quite what they’re supposed to taste like (and exposure to UV and temperature changes would accelerate this). Also, alcohol evaporation can make the spirit susceptible to bacterial growth, so it’s not recommended to drink cloudy spirits that didn’t start out cloudy.

             All this to say, if you have a really nice bottle for special occasions, it’s probably not a great idea to just have a pour once a year for 10-20 years.

             1. Haha that’s probably right. In our house spirits tend to get used up…

15. Small firm, mostly women attorneys. We always have wine in the office, and most partners get cases of wine delivered here. Generally, we only drink the wine to celebrate a big victory, on a slow Friday, or if everyone is stuck here late.

16. I hate that alcohol in the work place is a thing. I work in a state where many law firms still have “Friday happy hours” in the firm (usually lawyers only) where they cozy up in a partner’s office or drink in the break areas. I hate it because there are so many people who struggle and/or are sober, and there just aren’t options to include them at this time. I don’t partake, although I’m a social drinker (I can do one drink per night/event and not get shamed into drinking more). But I hate it, especially with so many of my contemporaries – under 40s – struggling with substance use or abuse.

    1. Agreed. As a sober person, I get that I’m just not going to progress in my career in the way that drinking buddies with higher ups are. It’s a bummer.

       1. Also agree. At the job I left a few months ago there was alcohol everywhere, and the key people on the leadership team wanted it that way. I hated how awful and inappropriate that situation it was for people in recovery, for our clients in recovery who were placed in awkward situations, or for people who simply didn’t want to drink (like me).

    2. I do not eat carbs. Should I hate everybody for eating pizza or cakes in the office?

       1. People who are eating pizza or cake typically don’t harangue others who choose not to eat pizza or cake. Alcohol is different. There are always losers who can’t make it through the day without it (which is not helped by tee-hee-mommy-needs-wine culture), losers who wouldn’t attend a wedding if they knew there wouldn’t be a bar for them, and losers who can’t just “let” the person next to them order an iced tea but they have to harangue them about why they aren’t drinking.

    3. I think people in alcohol-soused culture don’t even realize how utterly tacky and gauche it is. It’s kind of like gun culture in that regard.

17. I have worked at 5 firms over 20 years of practice, there has been alcohol in the office at all but one. The amount of actual drinking varied a lot – from “we have regular in-house Happy Hours for anyone who wants to come” to “champagne for a win” to “there is a bottle of nice liquor in a partner’s office that gets opened occasionally.”

    It has not been an issue in any of those offices with the exception that I definitely noticed that partners (all men) will have drinks with the male associates alone but will only ask the women if there is another person present.

    1. That would have made me absolutely crazy. Grf.

       1. Yeah – one in particular who was former Navy and had apparently been taught that he should never be alone in a room with a female subordinate and a closed door. He would literally pass by my office to round up a male attorney and then double back to ask me to join them. (Not a drinking thing – but he would also meet with the male attorneys in his office; he would meet me in the glass walled conference room.)

          But at least he DID ask me to join them (and otherwise treated me very well). Another partner at the same firm would socialize with the men all the time (drinks, golf, sporting events) and never invited any of the women. AND would definitely give preference to his buddies.

18. a deal-mate brought back nice tequila from a trip as a gift so another jr and I used to sip that around 30 min prior to leaving if we were the only ones on the floor working on something late at night. i haven’t replenished that bottle, but once in a while we’ll do something similar on the floor (same practice group, various levels of seniority). we were trying to do regular happy hours with snacks /wine/ liquor.
    i like having a bottle around so that you can share it when it’s well-deserved and celebratory with the team (e.g. all the closing docs are finally done around 10pm at night prior to closing)

19. An attorney I was interviewing with at a firm broke out the bottle in my interview to make a comment along the lines of how fun they were. The firm I did end up working for had alcohol in the office, but the attorneys generally went out to HH (VERY regularly) vs. in the office. When I worked for an alcohol trade association, we celebrated good news and holidays in the board room with a drink, and it was a free for all when the member companies dropped off the holiday bottle drop. The company where I work now has a zero tolerance policy for all substances.

20. When I worked at a firm (07-10) they sponsored an open bar happy hour every Friday evening in a large conference room.

21. Small law firm. I do occasionally keep a bottle of whiskey or tequila in my office. My partner does as well. In the 10 years we’ve been working together, we’ve probably drank in the office less than 1-2 times per year. Sometimes with staff, sometimes with clients who were sticking around for a social visit after the work part of the meeting was done. We’ll also get champagne to celebrate a big win or something not directly work related like a paralegal getting accepting to law school. We’ll also go out to employer sponsored snacks/happy hours occasionally, usually when a long-time staff member is leaving, always to a restaurant or someplace that any interns or other under 21s can be included.

22. When I graduated college and started as a trainee at a regional bank, I worked on one of the corporate floors where the EVPs had offices with the secretaries with beehive hairdos outside. Every Friday at 4, they’d break out the drinks and often we trainees would join them. You could smell the booze all over the floor. It was definitely a different place and time. I’ve never watched Mad Men but similar elements.

23. I’m surprised at the amount of alcohol many of you are describing. I work in higher ed. Our university (an Ivy) has a robust policy about alcohol use at campus events and staff functions on and off campus.

    There is a nice campus restaurant/bar that many administrators and faculty use for events, campus visitors, and interviews. We occasionally have a glass of wine with lunch there or a cocktail hour to celebrate an important achievement. These events (often new staff, retirement parties, holidays, or the like) are few and far between, and I have never seen anyone have more than two drinks. Non-alcoholic options are always available and promoted before alcohol.

    Maybe it’s a liability thing having to do with underage students. I haven’t seen a bottle of hard liquor in an office since I worked in publishing 20 years ago.

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