A few weeks ago, I posted on COVID-19 and business interruption insurance, quoting from part of a forthcoming coauthored article presented at the Business Law Prof Blog symposium last fall.  This week, I am posting a few more teaser paragraphs from that same article, which focuses overall on business law issues, practice changes, and professional responsibility challenges emanating from the pandemic.  Today’s excerpts focus on lawyers working from home.  Second-year UT Law student Anne Crisp is the primary author of the part of the paper that includes these paragraphs (from which footnotes have been omitted).

 . . . While the work-from-home movement was already taking off in many sectors prior to COVID-19, the legal sector had been slow to adopt this working model. Leaving aside multijurisdictional practice challenges, lawyer resistance to remote work has been attributed in large part to the perceived relationship-based nature of lawyering and the perception that at least some clients expect to meet with their legal counsel in well-appointed offices. But along came COVID-19, and lawyers could no longer avoid the pull of the work-from-home movement. If lawyers wanted to bill hours, they were going to have to work from home.

As lawyers began working from home, law offices were forced to enhance their technological resources and capabilities to meet the needs of the firm and to confront the technological challenges associated with such developments. Issues around laptop-versus-desktop use, home Wi-Fi capacity and security, and virtual private networks emerged as pressing problems to address. Lawyers, like everyone else in the world, began using videoconferencing and telecommunication platforms such as Zoom to meet with clients, colleagues, and the courts on a regular basis, rather than in specific circumstances. Lawyers adapted to the work-from-home model not by choice, but out of necessity.

Law firms also had to address security concerns that arise as a result of remote working. Malware infections, hacking, and other challenges are more difficult to prevent once workers are no longer regularly connected to a law office’s computer network. Firms with appropriate cybersecurity systems in place had to ramp up their availability to cover more workers; those without appropriate security technologies needed to acquire and implements them on an urgent basis.

Moreover, communication complications became manifest, and the need to address them holistically became important. “In a remote working world, everyone’s delegation/supervision/feedback skills must be even better—more frequent, more clear and more realistic—than usual.” For example, in a private firm, a practice group leader may need to intentionally ask how an individual is doing because the leader can no longer gauge this based on their interaction with the individual in the office. Junior lawyers in office settings must be more transparent and realistic about their own constraints as their home environments change. It has also become more important for junior lawyers to take clear ownership of the work they are doing so that senior lawyers, whose focus is on more directly helping clients navigate the issues arising, can more easily monitor who is working on what and keep track of the status of projects. Before the pandemic, communication challenges of the kinds mentioned here may have been barriers to lawyers working from home. Now, lawyers have no choice but to overcome them.

While the work-from-home movement has presented new challenges surrounding security and communication, it has also produced some positive effects. Working from home often creates a more relaxed work environment that has been shown to lead to more creativity. Additionally, lawyers are enjoying the benefits of having no commute. Many lawyers have liked working from home so much that they hope to continue to do so once the pandemic is over. It remains to be seen whether law firms will allow them to continue to do so in a post-pandemic world.

There is so much I could say about all this.  But I will confine myself here to two points, both stemming from the text of that last quoted paragraph. The positive aspects of lawyers’ adaptive work-from-home lives generate their own set of challenges. 

First, law firms are making decisions about the extent to which they will allow work-from-home after the pandemic.  (So are law schools.)  The managing shareholder of a regional law firm’s Knoxville office participated in my Advanced Business Associations class last week, and he indicated his concern that new and junior associates be physically present in the office in order to ensure that they are exposed and acclimate to the firm’s culture. 

Second, return-to-the-workplace mandates will result in some bumpy transitions back to full in-person operations.  Child, elder, and general family care routines devised for use during the pandemic may be as (or more) difficult to unwind than they were to create.  For many, it is not an option to merely go back to the way things were before COVID-19.

I suspect that, as we come out of the pandemic, different firms will handle 2021 work location transitions in different ways based on their size, market, reputation, culture, and more.  The type of work being performed by the lawyers and client preference are likely to play specific guiding roles in the analysis.  This certainly will be an area to watch.