This law firm sends hundreds of employees on intense hiking trips: ‘There’s nobody out there who is going to do anything for you, other than your colleagues

For more than 30 years, law firm Quinn Emanuel has hosted company offsites in some of the most remote locations across the globe. But they’re the farthest thing from a vacation. These annual hiking trips are grueling sometimes multi-day rituals meant to build camaraderie and put legal teams to the test.

“It’s intense,” says Tigran Guledjian, partner at Quinn Emanuel and co-chair of the firm’s national intellectual property litigation practice. He helps run the hikes, and has been attending them for more than 20 years. “You carry your own backpack with your own tent, and your own sleeping bag, and your own food, and you are responsible for yourself. There’s nobody out there who is going to do anything for you, other than your colleagues.” 

The firm’s hiking tradition began in 1993, when founder John B. Quinn led 15 legal analysts through Coyote Gulch in Utah. Since then, the outing has grown significantly, and the firm started travelling internationally in 2008. Now hundreds of employees flock each year to iconic trails like Switzerland’s Faulhornweg, Japan’s Mount Fuji, and Greece’s Mount Olympus, to name a few. 

Last month the firm took around 250 employees, a quarter of the company, to Cusco, Peru to hike part of the Andes mountain range. They could choose between an 8.5-mile trek to 14,000 feet or an even more rigorous 18-mile overnight to more than more than 15,000 feet.

“These are not easy hikes,” says Stephen Wood, managing partner of the firm’s Salt Lake City Office, who also helps execute the event. “They challenge everyone and we have a broad spectrum of people who are there, from collegiate athletes and those who do Iron Mans for fun, to those who have never camped out in their lives.”

Partners say while the trip is expensive for the law firm, but the costs are worth it, because employees learn to lean on each other when times get rough, and build valuable relationships in the process. In fact, those who have the most difficult time, Guledjian says, are the ones who end up having “the most rewarding experience.”

You can read more about the firm’s extreme offsite ritual here.

Brit Morse
brit.morse@fortune.com

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