RTO Mandate: California State Lawyers Warn of Bar License Risk

A new argument against working in the office

America's fights over return-to-office rules have mostly been about commutes, childcare, productivity and whether employers are quietly trying to push people out. California's state lawyers have now raised a different objection: legal ethics. The union representing them says Gov. Gavin Newsom's four-day in-office mandate is putting attorneys in workspaces where they could end up revealing confidential client information. That kind of breach could expose them to discipline and put their law licenses at risk.

The union is California Attorneys, Administrative Law Judges and Hearing Officers in State Employment, known as CASE. It has filed roughly 15 charges with the Public Employment Relations Board since July. The charges say state departments did not properly negotiate telework arrangements.11 Patrick Whalen, the union's general counsel, said the state is putting members in a position where they could commit an ethical violation by letting confidential client details reach people who should not hear them.11

This may look like a narrow labor dispute in Sacramento. But it connects to a larger question that has hung over the tech industry and the wider white-collar economy all year: what happens when office mandates are imposed faster than the workplace can be adapted for them?

What the union is actually claiming

The practical complaint is simple. Some attorneys have been assigned cubicles where they take confidential calls a few feet from coworkers.11 Whalen said some departments have lawyers in one section representing one side of a case while lawyers in another section of the same department represent the other side. Those two groups need to be physically separated.11

CASE Vice President Matthew Gauger gave an example from the Department of Toxic Substances Control. Its attorneys work with organizations taking part in pollution cleanups. If two pollution plumes overlap, lawyers handling the separate matters cannot know each other's trade secrets while the question of which fund pays for cleanup is still being worked out.11 The department did not respond to questions about private spaces for confidential calls, and CalHR, the state's human resources department, declined to comment on the confidentiality concerns.11

The union wants a statewide telework policy modeled on the Attorney General's Office. That office is not covered by the governor's order and has no fixed number of in-office days; division managers decide.11 CASE points to language in Newsom's executive order that lets departments consider their own operational needs when deciding on telework, and that requires individual requests to be judged case by case.11

Not all coverage has described the union's argument the same way. A Marin County outlet that summarized the story focused on commuting fatigue hurting attorneys' ability to review complex documents.12 The original reporting does not focus on that. It centers on physical confidentiality and how bargaining was handled.11 The confidentiality version is the stronger and more specific claim, and it is the one in the union's actual filings, so it is the one worth following.

The bargaining fight underneath

The legal case turns less on ethics than on labor procedure. Whalen said CalHR initially told CASE to negotiate department by department. The union met with about 40 agencies and got almost nowhere: nearly every meeting ended in an unfair labor practice charge, and he expects more filings.11 An amended charge against CalHR says many departments repeated the same phrases word for word, including that specific requests needed CalHR approval. The union argues this shows central coordination of what was presented as local bargaining.11 CalHR said it does not comment on pending litigation.11

The union faces a difficult legal standard. Tim Yeung, a labor lawyer in private practice, noted that the state can impose terms at an impasse if it bargained in good faith first. The two sides met over the four-day mandate in late April, more than two months before it took effect.11 PERB will decide whether that process met the good-faith test. The union's evidence includes a records request that CalHR called "wholly impractical" and turned down within two days.11

This is CASE's second attempt to stop the mandate. Earlier this summer, an Alameda County Superior Court judge rejected its request for an injunction. The union had argued that agencies broke the California Environmental Quality Act by not studying the environmental effects of bringing workers back.113

How California got here

Newsom signed the four-day order in March 2025. It originally took effect in July 2025, with exceptions allowed case by case.9 Unions bargained for a one-year delay during a budget crisis. CASE's 2025 deal kept attorneys on their existing telework policy until July 2026 in exchange for a 3% raise that was more than cancelled out by unpaid personal leave, which amounted to a 4.6% pay cut.14 Put plainly, the lawyers paid for twelve more months of hybrid work, and the mandate arrived anyway on July 1, 2026.3

About 108,000 of California's roughly 245,900 state employees are covered.2 The state's own count has shifted. When the order was issued, the governor's office said about 95,000 employees were remote or hybrid.9 CASE represents more than 5,000 people, about a quarter of whom work in the Attorney General's Office and are not affected.14

The administration's case for the order has been thin. Newsom has pointed to collaboration, mentorship and trust. But the governor's office has not given evidence to the state auditor or reporters, and it treats departments' office-space data as confidential.3 The auditor estimated that keeping telework could save about $225 million a year.2 A May memo from the governor's office claimed 98% of departments had enough space. It also said space shortages would not delay anyone's return and ruled out rotating schedules that bring people in fewer than four days.7 The cubicle complaints follow directly from that instruction: if every available desk has to be filled, the private offices lawyers once used for sensitive calls may simply not exist.

CalMatters noted that California is now stricter than Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott reversed his own ban on remote work after three months.2

The tech-industry parallel

Newsom's order explicitly cited the private sector. It said several leading private employers had recently increased in-person requirements.9 That trend has only grown stronger. Instagram moved most U.S. staff to five days in the office in February 2026, Microsoft required three days for hybrid workers, and TikTok and Paramount Skydance adopted full-week mandates.24 In September, Uber combined a cut of about 3,300 jobs with a return-to-office push that leaves only 1% of employees remote.27

Those mandates have arrived alongside heavy tech layoffs. Trackers counted 81,700 cuts in the first quarter alone, the highest quarterly total since early 2023.23 Several analysts and career advisers argue that some employers use office mandates to shrink headcount through attrition, which avoids severance and the reputational cost of layoffs.2423 One survey cited in industry analyses found that a quarter of executives admitted hoping some employees would leave voluntarily.21

Research on who actually leaves is fairly consistent. A study of 54 large S&P 500 tech and financial firms found turnover rose 13% to 14% after mandates. Senior and highly skilled workers left at the highest rates, and women left about three times as fast as men.25 The data also point the other way on how many people actually quit: one analysis found the share of workers willing to quit over a mandate fell from 51% to 7% in a year.22 That contrasts with SEIU Local 1000 President Anica Walls, who warned of a "mass exodus" from state government.8 The likeliest outcome for California is what the private-sector data suggest: most people comply, but the workers with the best outside options leave.

Why this dispute matters

My reading is that CASE's ethics argument is more significant than its chances before PERB. Office mandates are usually framed as a trade-off between management's preference and workers' convenience. The lawyers are making a different claim: that rules written for generic office work can collide with professional duties, such as confidentiality and conflict screening, that come from outside the employer. Law is only one example. The same tension could apply to state clinicians, auditors and investigators, and to private-sector teams handling regulated data.

The state may well win on procedure, since a good-faith bargaining record would let it impose terms at an impasse.11 But that would not solve the problem the union has identified. Unless departments set aside private space, Sacramento will have attorneys discussing protected matters within earshot of colleagues on the other side of a case. Neither a court ruling nor a memo about filling desks fixes that.