It’s hard to imagine that anything good might come out of the coronavirus/COVID-19 crisis. I almost died from COVID-19, spending six days on a ventilator in critical condition, so I certainly don’t have many good things to say about the disease.
And so far, for Biglaw, the news associated with coronavirus has been … bad. If you scroll through Above the Law’s coronavirus coverage, you’ll see story after story about firm after firm implementing reductions or delays in partnership draws, cuts or freezes for associate and staff compensation, and more drastic measures, like layoffs and furloughs.
But upon reflection, I came up with a few silver linings to the coronavirus cloud. Here they are:
1. A greater openness to working remotely.
This is perhaps the most obvious benefit of the current crisis. Forced by stay-at-home orders to work remotely, lawyers have done so — and have discovered that the world continues to turn.
Many younger lawyers, especially millennials, are quite familiar and comfortable with working remotely. But many older lawyers, the ones who have traditionally resisted remote working, are now discovering that it’s quite feasible — and really not that bad.
Exhibit A: David Boies, chairman and founding partner of Boies Schiller Flexner.
“I’ve always been dubious about working remotely,” Boies told me when we spoke by phone yesterday. “I didn’t quite understand how you can have the interactions that are so critical for practice. But now I’m getting into experiences and patterns of working remotely where I’ve developed these same kinds of interactions.”
Another friend, also a partner at a top Biglaw firm, posted on Facebook a list of things that she hopes we retain even after we enter “our next normal.” Here’s one of her items: “A more flexible attitude towards work from home in workplaces like mine that have been slow to adopt it. God knows, I’m dying to get back to my office, and see my colleagues in person, and I still think a lot of personal interaction is good for the work and good for people, but now that we’ve demonstrated that we CAN work from anywhere, a once-a-week tolerance wouldn’t be so bad.”
2. More tech savvy among lawyers, especially older lawyers.
In a piece for the Times of London, Richard Susskind, a longtime observer of the legal profession, made this prediction:
If law firms and court systems cannot find a way to work remotely in the coming weeks, Covid-19 will rapidly run them into the ground. To do so they will need systems to manage secure messaging, video calling, online collaboration and virtual meetings. Tools and companies previously unknown to most lawyers and judges — such as the messaging services Signal, Zoom, Slack and Google Hangouts — will be embedded in everyday legal life within a fortnight.-
And it sounds like lawyers and law firms are learning how to work remotely, by embracing technologies that many of them resisted learning about for the longest time. In my conversation the other day with David Boies, he marveled at how many tech tools he has learned how to use in the past few weeks — out of necessity.
“I’m meeting with co-counsel by Zoom, I’m arguing to a court of appeals in a few weeks by videoconference, and I’m FaceTiming with my grandkids,” he said. “Like many senior lawyers, I resisted adopting new technologies — but now we’re being forced to, and it’s a good thing.”
3. An enhanced focus on value and efficiency.
The Great Recession shifted some power away from Biglaw and toward in-house counsel. The recession (or depression?) arising out of the coronavirus crisis will likely do the same, meaning that law firms will have to compete harder than ever to win the business of corporate counsel. As Basha Rubin and Mirra Levitt, co-founders of Priori, wrote in a smart and thoughtful piece for Corporate Counsel:
As a result [of the economic crisis], many in-house legal departments will reduce their outside counsel spending and pause W-2 hiring. In turn, those changes will put pressure on law firms and other service providers to deliver higher quality services more efficiently and cost-effectively than before the pandemic crisis…. [T]he pressure to deliver excellent services at lower cost could incentivize collaboration — and potentially drive valuable long-lasting partnerships throughout the legal ecosystem.
This pressure could be painful (or even fatal) for firms that can’t cut it. But it will be a tonic to the firms that rise to the challenge, and beneficial for Biglaw as a whole.
4. A greater sense of perspective.
I emerged from my COVID-19 battle with a much better sense of what truly matters. When you’re fighting for your life, wondering if you’ll ever see your family again, you realize that most of what we get stressed about in day-to-day life is pretty petty. Our nation and our profession are undergoing a similar crisis — and crisis helps put things in perspective.
In normal times, litigators love to get worked up over document productions. They enjoy holding opposing counsel’s feet to the fire, demanding strict compliance with discovery deadlines.
But I just heard a story from a New York litigator that I don’t think I would have heard in normal times. This litigator is handling a document production that’s due in a few weeks. Opposing counsel, lawyers from out of state, reached out and said, in essence, “We’ve heard about what you’ve been going through in New York. Are you okay with the current deadline, or do you need more time? If you need more time, just let us know, and we’ll notify the court.”
Litigators playing well with each other? We are definitely not living in ordinary times. And maybe that’s not (entirely) a bad thing.
David Lat, the founding editor of Above the Law, is a writer, speaker, and legal recruiter at Lateral Link, where he is a managing director in the New York office. David’s book, Supreme Ambitions: A Novel (2014), was described by the New York Times as “the most buzzed-about novel of the year” among legal elites. David previously worked as a federal prosecutor, a litigation associate at Wachtell Lipton, and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@laterallink.com.