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Four Things to Learn From the People Who Saved Law Firms Late January 2020: Chris McDaniel was discussing cybersecurity at a conference in Phoenix when he and other law firm chief information officers started receiving eerily similar emails from their bosses. The message was simple but profound: the novel coronavirus was spreading, so please prepare for everyone in the firm to work from home.
“Holy shit,” McDaniel remembers thinking. Then he and his 15-member team at Atlanta-based Smith Gambrell & Russell got to work planning how nearly 450 people could remotely access the firm’s network.
At the same time in Winston-Salem, Bradley Bragg, the CIO at Womble Bond Dickinson, started shifting his sights from managing technology in 19 offices to watching it perform in basements, living rooms, kitchens and other alternative work stations for 1,300 lawyers and staff.
Bragg was used to lawyers having remote access to the firm’s network from courtrooms and while traveling, but this was something else. His team asked everyone in the firm to log in after 9 p.m. Eastern Time on the second Sunday of March to find out if the system could manage the load.
About 900 people clicked on, and, “it worked,” Bragg said, with relief that was palpable a year later. “15 March was a huge day for us.”
Ask a law firm chairman or managing partner about how they have survived—and thrived—in the past 13 months, and you’ll hear that information technology teams saved the firm by making it possible for everyone to work from their socially distanced home. We contacted some IT leaders to hear their stories of last year and what they’re thinking about now, as firms consider bringing people back to offices in a changed environment.
It was time well spent because, as Lance Rea, the CIO of Baker Donelson said, “We know a lot about how law firms work … beyond connecting to the VPN.”
Here’s what we learned:
The pandemic highlighted—then reduced—the divide between lawyers and staff
While most lawyers already had the capability to work remotely, each CIO said they scrambled to make sure that non-lawyer staff had the computer hardware to work from home. “The vast majority had never connected from home,” Rea said, estimating that about 40% of the people in Baker Donelson’s 21 offices did not have remote access at the pandemic’s beginning.
Some firms allowed staff to take desktop computers home, while others secured as many laptops as possible or asked staff to use their home computers with secure, remote connections to the firm.
Then the matter was making sure everyone knew how to use the equipment and software. Bragg said Womble Bond’s outsourced helpdesk “became overwhelmed” as calls rose from a normal of 300 per day to 900 per day in the first week of remote work. “It was back to normal by the end of the week,” he added.
“It was insanely busy for my support team,” McDaniel said. Smith Gambrell’s six-member unit worked 14 to 15 hours per day, as lawyers and staff first had to make sure they could connect and then wanted advice on efficiencies and equipment—extra monitors, printers and home wifi connections.
As much as the beginning of the pandemic may have highlighted the differences between lawyers and staff, however, McDaniel noted that the past 13 months have brought people together. “It was very equalizing,” he said, as everyone in the firm saw others with various challenges at home, such as children trying to do online school, babies crying or dogs barking.
Scrutinize home internet connections
This democratizing of lawyers and staff led firms to have to pay attention to an issue none has ever considered: someone’s personal internet access point.
While many systems worked well, Bragg said of anyone relying on satellite internet connections, “There’s nothing I can do for you except pray you get something else.”
“In my career,” Bragg said, “I’ve never had to focus on someone’s home office.” But he suggested that firms may need to assess workers’ home Internet access if they continue to work remotely, even after firms fully reopen offices.
View paperless practice as (close to) reality
Looking to the future, each CIO expects some lawyers and staff to work from home at least some of the time, but they agreed that the pandemic has created a significant shift in everyone embracing nearly paperless legal work.
At Baker Donelson, Rea recalled last year urging lawyers to purchase cross-cut shredders because security needs meant paper documents couldn’t be tossed into the family trash cans.
“They’re almost paper free now,” he said.
The CIOs each said their firms are using digital methods for lawyers and clients to revise documents, get them signed and to have them notarized.
McDaniel said such moves were planned for the future, but the pandemic forced everyone to accelerate their adoption. His firm embraced technology to create digital closing document binders, “something we hadn’t thought of” before COVID-19.
‘Work isn’t a place. It’s an activity’
Rea, who moved from a job at Epstein Becker & Green in New York to Baker Donelson’s Nashville office just a year before the pandemic, emphasized that his team’s job is to “keep everyone working” by supplying the firm with “tools and technology in a way that almost seems like magic.”
But technology requires buy-in from the people using it, and the pandemic encouraged—or forced—such experimentation. “I was really impressed” with how lawyers embraced video meetings and other new ways to conduct business, said Bill Koch, Womble’s chief knowledge officer.
His colleague Bragg sees more changes on the way, all in an effort to improve efficiency. He’s aiming for everyone in his firm to be able to do 70% to 90% of their work on an iPad by 2025.
Considering the prospect of lawyers with everything they need on an iPad—to be able to do that work from anywhere—makes me think of how McDaniel summed up the lessons from law firms’ remote work in the pandemic.
“Work isn’t a place,” he said. “It’s an activity.”
Are lawyers more or less productive working from home?
Courtesy of Caitlin Kennedy, analyst for ALM Intelligence, below is a look at how associates and partners rate themselves in terms of productivity when working from home versus working in the office. The responses come from a Law.com Pro survey.
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