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Dickinson Wright, a firm that took the 128th spot on the 2019 Am Law 200, is yet another Biglaw firm that is planning for the financial fallout from COVID-19. Like so many other of its peers, the firm has decided to institute austerity measures to minimize the harm of decreased revenues.

So what is going on at the firm? Tipsters report staff layoffs. The firm has also pulled the plug on its summer associate program (though everyone who was scheduled to participate will receive an offer). And the new batch of associates scheduled to start in the fall? Postponed until January 2021.

According to reports, the firm has issued the following statement about its austerity measures:

“Our leadership has developed a tiered contingency plan for the potential of reduced revenues. This plan entails reducing discretionary spending, implementing an approximately 3% reduction in workforce, canceling our summer program yet providing everyone in that summer class an offer, and deferring our fall incoming class of associates to January.”

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries, closing its doors, or reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

If you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Layoff Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the layoff alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each layoff, salary cut, or furlough announcement that we publish.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

It was easy news to miss, since every recent headline containing the words “Am Law 100” seems to involve a story like Am Law 100 Firm Slashes Salaries or Am Law 100 Firm Furloughs Some, Slashes Salaries For All. So in case you did miss it: last week, the American Lawyer issued the latest Am Law 100 rankings.

The annual Am Law 100 rankings represent the nation’s 100 largest law firms, ranked by revenue. The new rankings, the 2020 Am Law 100, reflect the performance of Biglaw firms in 2019 — i.e., well before the coronavirus-driven economic downturn arrived.

Some might say: isn’t it a bit frivolous to focus on vanity metrics like profits per partner during such a time of crisis for Biglaw? But as Gina Passarella, editor-in-chief of the American Lawyer, noted on Twitter, firm finances are especially important at a time like this: they give us insight into which firms will pull through, and which ones … won’t.

So let’s dig right in. In terms of the big picture, 2019 was a very good year for the world of large law firms. Here are some metrics (noted by David Thomas in his insightful analysis of the rankings):

• Total revenue: $104 billion, up by 5 percent.
• Average revenue per lawyer: $1,001,289, up by 3 percent.
• Profits per equity partner: $1,967,895, up by 5 percent

These are impressive figures. As recently as 2014, boasting RPL of $1 million or more and PPP of $2 million or more put a firm in an elite club that Am Law dubbed the “Super Rich.” Now, those same figures make a firm … your average Am Law 100 firm.

“Everything we heard from clients at the beginning of 2020 was that 2019 was another good year, comparable to 2018,” Altman Weil consultant Eric Seeger told Am Law. “We had quite a few clients tell us that 2019 was a record financial year for them.”

But that was then, and this is now. Not surprisingly, the experts surveyed by Thomas and Am Law are not optimistic about 2020, expecting Biglaw to take a bath.

Of course, some firms will feel more pain than others:

Generally speaking, law firms that performed well in 2019 and have been performing well for the past couple of years are better positioned to weather the economic storm the COVID-19 pandemic is causing, [Wells Fargo’s Joe] Mendola says.

Zeughauser Group consultant Kent Zimmermann shares a similar sentiment. A law firm that is profitable has greater ”flexibility in how to manage through a crisis, particularly if there’s a significant drop in revenue,” he says.

With that background, let’s take a closer look at three key metrics — gross revenue, revenue per lawyer, and profits per partner — and the top 10 firms in each category.

Gross Revenue

In one sense, gross revenue is the critical metric, since the Am Law 100 consists of the 100 largest firms by revenue. A firm can have super-high profits per partner — but if its total revenue isn’t big enough, it won’t make the Am Law 100.

Here are the top 10 firms by gross revenue. You can access the full list here.

Once again, Kirkland & Ellis took the top spot, becoming the first firm to break the $4 billion mark after growing its revenue by an impressive 10.6 percent. The second-place finisher, Latham & Watkins, had even stronger growth — 11.3 percent — and racked up almost $3.8 billion in revenue.

As for the rest of the top 10 firms in the 2020 rankings, they were exactly the same as the top 10 firms in the 2019 rankings, with just some (small) changes in position. No firm moved up or down by more than a single spot.

As noted by ALM, some 41 law firms grossed more than $1 billion in 2019, up from 37 firms in 2018. Again, not long ago, breaking a billion was a major achievement for a Biglaw firm. Now, it makes a firm… slightly above average in the Am Law 100.

Revenue Per Lawyer

Many industry observers regard revenue per lawyer as the best indicator of a firm’s financial health. It can’t be manipulated as easily by gross revenue, which can be goosed by growing headcount (e.g., through a series of mergers), or profits per partner, which can be supercharged by shrinking the equity partnership (e.g., through de-equitization).

Here are the top 10 firms by revenue per lawyer. You can access the full list here.

Wachtell Lipton retained the top spot, with RPL of $3.3 million — some $1.5 million more than the second-place firm, Sullivan & Cromwell. Who says alternative fee arrangements can’t work? (In its flagship M&A practice, Wachtell Lipton generally bills based on the size and complexity of a transaction as opposed to by the hour.)

Most of the top firms by RPL remained the same. Congratulations to Gibson Dunn and Davis Polk on making the top ten this year, coming in at #9 and #10, respectively.

Profits Per Partner

And now, profits per partner or PPP, the ranking you’ve all been waiting for.

Here are the top 10 firms by profits per partner. You can access the full list here.

Once again, Wachtell Lipton leads the way, with a whopping $6.3 million in PPP for 2019. That represented a decrease of 3.1 percent from 2018, but it still left Wachtell more than $1 million ahead of its closest rival — Kirkland & Ellis, with $5.2 million in PPP (up by 3.1 percent from 2018).

Again, there wasn’t much movement in the top 10 firms. Skadden Arps returned to the top 10, in the #10 spot, but all of the other top 10 firms were in the top 10 last year. To make the top 10, a firm needed almost $4 million in revenue — an incredible sum.

The rest of the Am Law 100 also fared well in terms of partner profits. As noted by ALM, 24 firms had PPP of $3 million or more, up from 20 firms last year. For the Am Law 100 as a whole, average PPP increased by 5 percent in 2019.

Ah, 2019… it seems like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it? Alas, 2020 is looking very, very different.

Here at Lateral Link, we believe that the current crisis presents opportunities, for both individual lawyers and for law firms. Although the associate lateral market has cooled (unless you’re in bankruptcy — in which case, please drop me a line), the lateral partner market remains active — just as it did during the last recession.

Why? For at least two reasons. First, when firms face a shrinking pie, the way to grow revenue is by grabbing a bigger slice of that smaller pie — and the way to do that is by bringing aboard partners with big books of business.

Second, as some law firms start to encounter financial trouble, the partners at these firms with strong, portable practices will start looking around. These partners will seek more stable platforms — and might even be able to “upgrade” their platforms, since the most prestigious and profitable firms will probably weather the storm better than many others.

But a firm doesn’t need to be super-prestigious or profitable in order to benefit from the current climate. If a firm is well (and conservatively) managed — with lots of liquidity, and a war chest sufficient to ride out the crisis and lure top talent — it will also be able to get in on the lateral partner action.

If you’re a partner contemplating a lateral move or a law firm interested in lateral hiring, please feel free to reach out to me or to any of my colleagues at Lateral Link. We are ready and eager to help you navigate this rapidly evolving environment — and to take advantage of the unique opportunities that it presents.

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from Lateral Link’s team of expert contributors. David Lat is a managing director in the New York office, where he focuses on placing top associates, partners and partner groups into preeminent law firms around the country.

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Lateral Link is one of the top-rated international legal recruiting firms. With over 14 offices world-wide, Lateral Link specializes in placing attorneys at the most prestigious law firms and companies in the world. Managed by former practicing attorneys from top law schools, Lateral Link has a tradition of hiring lawyers to execute the lateral leaps of practicing attorneys. Click ::here:: to find out more about us.

Dorsey & Whitney, a firm which made $387,184,000 in gross revenue last year making it 98th on the Am Law 100, has joined the ranks of Biglaw firms making COVID-19 austerity moves. The firm is taking a variety of cost-cutting measures, but, so far, salary cuts and layoffs are off the table.

So what is going on? The firm has capped their monthly equity partner distributions. They are also furloughing staff that cannot perform their jobs remotely, estimated as less than 4 percent of staff. The firm’s contributions to its employees’ retirement plans are taking the biggest hit, with a 33 percent cut.

According to Law.com, the firm said it will “reevaluate its measures from time-to-time and is intent on limiting disruptions to its workforce as much as possible.”

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries, closing its doors, or reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

If you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Layoff Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the layoff alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each layoff, salary cut, or furlough announcement that we publish.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

There’s a lot to be said about the new federal clerkship guidelines issued by the Ad-Hoc Committee on Law Clerk Hiring to address the challenges brought on by the coronavirus outbreak. But stripped of the formalities of a pronouncement to America’s elite, life-tenure jurists, the new marching orders are little more than a suggestion for all judges to keep their heads firmly out of their asses.

The Committee, comprised of Chief Judge Robert Katzmann, Chief Judge Sidney Thomas, Chief Judge Diane Wood, and Earth-2 Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland, informed judges by letter that the latest version of the Law Clerk Hiring Plan is still in effect but that judges should interview candidates by phone or video chat rather than expecting them to fly across the country to show up at the courthouse. It’s guidance that serves as the federal judiciary equivalent of the “do not consume internally” warnings on bleach — an advisory that no one imagined necessary before the Trump administration got involved.

Because there may well be stodgy old judges unwilling to trust this new-fangled “teletalker” that Graham Bell feller pitched, but the more likely weak link in any plan to keep interviews at a distance are the more ideologically rabid of Trump’s appointees who might be tempted to follow the lead of some of the more of aggressively MAGA governors and blow off public health restrictions to own the libs. Not that an individual law student heading to a courthouse is akin to opening up a beach, but there’s just no reason to put someone through the stress of risking transmission for no purpose.

It’s not all about common sense though. The letter to judges also reiterates that applications should be handled electronically through the OSCAR system rather than through paper submission, mirroring the “clean your groceries” overreaction. It feels a lot more like they just want to get buy-in for OSCAR from recalcitrant judges and they’re hoping to use the virus to coax these judges into the tent.

But as anyone who’s been around the clerkship process for a while knows, this guidance — just like the hiring plan itself — is not mandatory. It’s unclear how many judges even bothered to follow the plan last year, and if history is any guide this regime will eventually fall apart as judges embrace the dystopian nightmare of wildly early application deadlines and exploding offers. As Karen Sloan muses in her piece on the new guidelines, “It remains to be seen whether the added hiring complications from COVID-19 prompt more judges to get on board with the plan or whether the new limitations will give rise to more judges seeking an advantage by hiring early.”

Which, like the Committee’s letter, employs the formal niceties required of discussing federal judges, but boils down to: yes, COVID-19 is going to give rise to more judges seeking an advantage by hiring early. Because as Yeats once described the federal clerkship hiring process, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”.

Federal Judicial Clerkship Hiring Process Revamped Due to COVID-19 [Law.com]

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Since Zimbabwe started lockdown measures on 30 March, farmers have been struggling to sell their produce. With restaurants closed and people staying away from markets, tonnes of tomatoes, avocados and other fruit and veg have been rotting in piles across the country. Since COVID-19, many farmers have recorded losses of thousands of dollars.

Some, however, have adopted new strategies to sell their produce. In the past few weeks, marketing posters have increasingly been popping up across social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp advertising direct home deliveries. From about $5 to $20, depending on the combination and number of vegetables, Zimbabweans trying to avoid infection from coronavirus can get farmers to bring food straight to their door.

Desire Jongwe, a farmer in eastern Zimbabwe, adopted this strategy after his usual ways of selling his produce became untenable. He had been preparing a batch of chickens for sale when the lockdown was announced.

“I asked myself ‘where can I get the market?’”, he says. “I had already discussed with restaurant owners and they had said they would take my chickens…I devised a plan on how I can sell my chicken online using social media.”

He created an ad and started sharing it. He followed this up with more posts, advertising basic vegetable packages for $5, $7 or $10 and allowing customers to choose a combination of leaf vegetables, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, squashes and peppers.

Thank you for your continued support to Farm Fresh. Because of logistical issues & our devotion to deliver fresh farm produce we will be doing deliveries twice per week that is Wednesdays & Saturdays. To order, contact the numbers below. We accept Ecocash/Zipit/Onemoney. pic.twitter.com/7u3qllnQSq

— The Wasu (@wasudigital) April 13, 2020

Soon, people began responding. Many were in the diaspora and wanted to buy food for their family members in Zimbabwe. They transferred money to Jongwe who delivered packages to their relatives. He says he is now making 10 to 15 deliveries three days a week. In the long run, Jongwe believes his income from this way of doing things will compare to his earnings before the lockdown.

“For me, the cost of production is lower than the prices of vegetables…The market value of vegetables is high and it’s lucrative,” he says.

Tichaona Saungweme, who lives close to the city of Mutare, is more cautious. He also turned to marketing his goods online after the lockdown was imposed.

“People are afraid of contracting coronavirus,” he says. “The only thing we can do as farmers is to reach the customers in the comfort of their homes through social media.”

This approach has enabled Saungweme to continue selling some of his goods, but he says it is not always straightforward and points out that many people are not online.

“It’s working but it still has some teething problems,” he says. “The social media market is still small.”

🙏🏾 https://t.co/9XfOvBJbeL

— Fresh In A Box  (@FreshInABox) April 2, 2020

Charles Dhewa is the CEO of Knowledge Transfer Africa whose flagship initiative eMKambo helps spread agricultural information through mobile and internet networks. He says that online adverts are becoming an increasingly important part of Zimbabwe’s food supply chain model. This trend has been supercharged by the lockdown.

“Virtual marketing is being embraced significantly,” he says. “Basically if one needs any commodity, there may be no need to visit Mbare [a market in Harare] because we can directly link him or her with diverse sellers and deals are sealed.”

Dhewa points out, however, that not all farmers in Zimbabwe can utilise this approach. A large proportion, he says, have suffered greatly from the lockdown. This includes many who sell fresh produce, those who live in peri-urban and rural areas, and chicken and egg and dairy farmers.

“Those into pork production have also suffered from low uptake by butcheries and gochi-gochi [barbecue] places which have been locked down,” he adds.

The livelihoods of huge swathes of the population in Zimbabwe, including many farmers and poor people, have been devastated by the coronavirus lockdown. But for those with the right resources, online marketing and home deliveries have offered a rare lifeline. According to Mutare’s mayor Blessing Tandi, this innovation along with decentralising wholesale vegetable markets have been crucial in helping contain the spread of COVID-19 in the city.

“It’s ideal in implementing social distancing,” he says. “This will mean our people in [the high density suburbs of] Chikanga or Dangamvura will not travel to Sakubva [Market] for vegetables.”

Business was tough in Zimbabwe even before Covid-19, but these entrepreneurs didn’t let anything discourage them! @FreshInABox says orders have grown “1000%” since the pandemic, and the unpredictable business climate in Zim was ‘the perfect training’. #InBusinessAfrica pic.twitter.com/vXknvxYzGy

— Nancy Kacungira (@kacungira) April 21, 2020

Post published in: Agriculture

The deluge of bad news caused by COVID-19 continues. This time Cozen O’Connor, a firm ranked 73rd on the 2020 Am Law 100, has made their stab at austerity measures. The good news is that compared to many other top firms, these measures aren’t too severe.

According to reports, equity partners will have between 10 and 20 percent of their compensation deferred to later this year. Additionally, staff who are unable to work remotely — ~5 percent of administrative staff — have been furloughed. Firm CEO Michael Heller has said that furloughed employees will have benefits covered by the firm and should receive full salaries through the CARES Act.

That means associates and the majority of the staff remain unscathed by the austerity measures. And the firm has indicated they’re trying to avoid layoffs or salary cuts for these folks.

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries, closing its doors, or reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

If you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Layoff Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the layoff alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each layoff, salary cut, or furlough announcement that we publish.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

The New York Board of Law Examiners already recognized that the Fall bar exam administration would be a logistical nightmare with the large venues usually booked for the test either unavailable on the new dates or unable to accommodate nearly the crowd with the distancing requirements people are still going to want to live by in September. We knew that charting a course for staggering the bar exam for everyone who wants to take it would be a process fraught with risk that the BOLE could easily end up pissing off a lot of people and it’s good to see our suspicions confirmed.

Announcing new bar exam guidelines, New York has figured out where it plans to draw the line on the Fall exam and it’s drawing it right at the New York border:

[A]pplications will be accepted from any J.D. or LL.M. candidate who is sitting for the bar examination for the first time and who has graduated (or will graduate in Spring 2020) from one of the fifteen law schools located in New York State: Albany Law School, Brooklyn Law School, University at Buffalo School of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Columbia Law School, CUNY School of Law, Cornell Law School, Fordham University School of Law, Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, New York Law School, New York University School of Law, Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, St. John’s University School of Law, Syracuse University College of Law, or Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center.

The 15 NY law schools will fill up the available bar exam seats, with registration running from May 5 to May 15, and “priority will not be given based on the date a candidate registers within that period.” After that, the state will consider what meager accommodations it has left, but with the bar already expected to be squatting in borrowed facilities just to meet this demand, it’s unlikely there will be many scraps left.

But it’s not like there are a ton of better options. With the big convention halls out, the bar exam is only happening because the New York law schools are donating their facilities. It’s a hard sell to say, “Thanks for the lecture hall, but we can’t let your folks take the exam because we need to shove a bunch of UVA people in here… thanks for understanding!”

This solution, as you might imagine, earned the ire of out-of-state law schools who routinely send their graduates to New York to work because, let’s be honest, few are lining up to start a legal career in New Haven and only about 10 percent of Dukies stick in the Southeast. The T14 — or maybe the T11 of schools not in New York — send substantial numbers to this market and the next clutch of law schools in the rankings, the T14 Penumbra if you will, aren’t exactly skimping on NY bar applicants every year.

Penn Law’s Ted Ruger took a welcome break from worrying about which Amy Wax outburst he’s going to have to deal with next to inform students that he and some amalgam of unnamed other T14 deans are pissed:

The order is misguided and quite possibly unlawful. It comes as a surprise to us, and to the deans at similarly situated top schools outside of New York with whom I have been in communication this evening. We plan to work collectively and individually in every way possible in the coming week to advocate against this decision. I am also meeting with our law school board tomorrow at 9:00 am, and have alerted them about the order and that this will be our main agenda item. The board includes several leaders at major NY firms to whom this also came as an unwelcome surprise, and they have let me know that they will work with us to challenge this unfair rule.

“Possibly unlawful”! Are the law schools going to sue New York over this? A fun hypo for the Con Law nerds out there. But what’s the alternative? If he used this email to pitch some form of diploma privilege plus or an online bar exam that would help generate some needed momentum for those entirely reasonable reforms. And maybe that’s ultimately what he’s going to do, but the tone of the message strongly indicates that he just wants New York to not give registration preference to New York students as if the state facing a massive shortage of seats should just hand a bunch of them to Penn at the expense of Fordham because U.S. News wills it so. That’s not a productive starting point.

For its part, the BOLE is encouraging out-of-state grads to consider taking the UBE in other jurisdictions, allowing New York to bring them in at a later date. On its face this isn’t an absurd proposal, but scratching the surface this poses other problems. If these people are going to be working in New York until they get licensed, is it fair to expect them to trek back to the sticks to take the bar exam? Can you even take the exam in a state if you never intend to apply for admission there? These states aren’t equipped to accommodate this influx of unexpected examinees in normal times let alone when facilities are at a premium.

We’re at this point because we’re still clinging to a bar exam tradition forged in an era when we didn’t have established professional schools and apprentices or even just random people could just apply to be lawyers. We know the bar exam has serious flaws, this is where we should be thinking creatively about better solutions. Diploma privilege systems won’t be easy and may require radical reforms of the law school system itself but watching how easily the existing regime goes off the rails should encourage everyone in the profession to take up the challenge.

Earlier: NY Bar Exam Encounters New Hurdle — Not Enough Space To Test Everyone
Law School Student Governments Petitioning For Diploma-Privileged Admission
NCBE Trashes Diploma Privilege, Sprinkles In Some Racist And Sexist Conclusions
Why Attorney Supervision Could Undermine The ‘Diploma Privilege Plus’ Movement

It’s no secret. The legal industry has long lagged behind the broader business world on most fronts. The world of remote working has been no exception. Yes, the basic tech is functionally available for most law firm attorneys. We mostly all have laptops and the ability to remote in and bill from our living rooms. But most large law firms still lack a real culture of remote working as a professional lifestyle.

Physical proximity is still the unspoken assumption of law firm life. In most firms, working regularly from home is an oddity to be commented on rather than a reflection of our digital 21st century reality. And that’s just on the attorney side of things. Even with the minor inroads remote working has made with lawyers, it remains virtually nonexistent as an option for professional staff. Having a legal administrative assistant working remotely would strike many attorneys as utterly preposterous. Isn’t physical presence part of the basic concept of the job?

The arguments against a remote working culture are timeworn. Remote teams can’t collaborate together as well. Workers at home get distracted by chores, naps, or Netflix. It’s unprofessional to take calls with clients or courts when kids or pets might be making noise in the background. You can’t pop your head in the office to ask a question or see how the day is going when someone is working out of their house.

The biggest argument by far, though, is the damage that remote working will do to a firm’s culture. So much of the special sauce that makes a good team is composed of those unplanned, serendipitous moments by the water cooler. Without proximity — and the chances to spontaneously gel that proximity brings — the fear is that we’ll lose our firms’ greater sense of unity and possibility.

The Cult Of Culture

I’ve got a complicated relationship with the idea of firm culture. On the one hand, it’s an essential element to maintaining and growing a firm. Without that central identity, it’s hard to attract and retain talent. Few folks out there just want to walk into an office, close the door, and bill. Most of us want to belong to something bigger, to have friends and colleagues with whom we’re proud to practice. There will usually be some other firm out there ready to overpay to attract lateral talent. When those firms come knocking with big checks in hand, a strong, positive culture can help fend off the headhunters.

But culture is both a sword and a shield. “It’ll damage the firm culture” gets thrown out almost any time I hear a proposal for some innovation in how we work. In these situations, culture is code for “we’ve always done things one way, so let’s never consider doing them in a way that might be better.” It’s an easy trump card to lay down, a cheap excuse to change nothing and continue to fall behind the times.

The culture argument has long been a dominant voice in the conversation around teleworking. It’s already easy for law firm attorneys to silo off ourselves or our practice groups and lose touch with our colleagues. Sometimes it can feel like physical presence is most of what keeps a firm together. The daily ritual of congregating at an office, saying hello to the admins in our impressive lobbies, stepping into mahogany-lined conference rooms for meetings … it all creates a sense of oneness that can’t be replicated anywhere else. Without the building where we work side-by-side every day, what actually unites us as a common entity with common goals? What else, besides our office, makes us a firm?

Because of COVID-19, we’re starting to learn how wrongheaded that thinking actually is.

Law In The Time Of Corona

COVID-19 continues to be a global tragedy of historic importance. By the time this is published, over 60,000 Americans will have died of the virus, out of over 225,000 worldwide deaths. The scope and human impact of this disease are hard to overstate, which is why the resilience of the people fighting it has been so remarkable.

Most people reading this column are likely working primarily from home. The legal industry has shifted from professional buildings to bedrooms and home offices. Instead of dropping by for a chat, we’re emailing, scanning, Zooming, Housepartying, FaceTiming, using every means at our disposal to stay connected with our colleagues, friends, and families. Not only do we seem to be maintaining our relationships and culture, we seem to be growing them in a positive direction.

Being stuck at home has made us more intentional about our communication with one another. The pop-ins and water cooler chats have been replaced by in-depth conversations and GIF threads on Slack. We’re all struggling, and all coming to one another’s rescue.

COVID-19 is forcing all of us to finally accept that working from home can and should be normal. Even the naysayers have been forced to try it themselves, and to make it work. They’re getting the chance to experience the well-documented benefits of teleworking for themselves. There have for sure been hiccups and headaches with the transition to remote working. I certainly owe our IT team a round of drinks once the quarantine is lifted. But I truly believe that despite losing that physical closeness, our firm culture is stronger than ever during this time.

Choosing Togetherness

Physical closeness is never going to go away. My firm isn’t canceling its building lease any time soon. Even firms deeply committed to teleworking like Fisher Broyles or Keystone continue to conduct at least some of their meetings in meet-space, either in pay-per-hour professional conference rooms or designated office spaces. But we’re finally being forced to use some of the tools that have long been at our disposal, and it’s making our industry richer.

A law firm isn’t a building. It’s not a collection of attorneys or practice groups. It’s not a letterhead or a recruiting class or a PPP metric. A law firm is a choice. It’s the decision people make to band together and form something greater than the sum of their parts. In the shadow of COVID-19 we’re now choosing to make that decision a little more consciously every day. In the process, I think we’re also choosing to make ourselves better people.

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James Goodnow is an attorney, commentator, and Above the Law columnist. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and is the managing partner of NLJ 250 firm Fennemore Craig. He is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management new release category. As a practitioner, he and his colleagues created a tech-based plaintiffs’ practice and business model. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at James@JamesGoodnow.com.

Boredom and isolation do strange things to human beings. It can make them do things they’d never consider in ordinary life: cut their own hair, imitate famous works of art, parent their children, talk to their parents, read books, make amends, get introspective.

The men and women of the Securities and Exchange Commission are also being quarantined, and they’re also reacting to the experience strangely. For the last three-and-a-half years, they’ve done their level best to do as little as is humanly possible. Now, however, in absence of any of the things they normally do to ensure they do as little as possible, they’ve gone positively hyperactive.