Category: Law Firms

• Part 1: What we’re up against
• Part 2: Justice system down
• Part 3: Justice reconstructed
• Part 4: Lawyer formation disrupted
• Part 5  Lawyer formation rescued
• Part 6: Lawyer formation re-engineered
• Part 7: Law firm essentials
• Part 8: Law firm transitions

Someone asked me the other day my opinion on where the pandemic is taking the legal profession, given my status as a “legal futurist.” I’ve never much liked that term and have never used it to describe myself, so I was happy to reply, “You know, I think we’re done talking about ‘the future.’ There’s not much point anymore. The future’s here.”

SARS-CoV-2 has convulsed the world and created extreme uncertainty in every facet of our lives, such that there are few benefits of trying to predict, today, what the world will look like after the crisis ends. Predictions based on what data? Relying on how much evidence?

We can make educated guesses and we can map out various scenarios, and I don’t want to discourage those attempts. But we know less than 10% of what we’ll eventually know about this disease and its impact on humanity. We’re in a whiteout blizzard; we need to wait for the storm to ease a little before we can start to make out the unfamiliar terrain around us.

What I’ve instead striven to provide in this series is not so much prediction as prescription: Here’s what we can do right now to get through the initial onslaught of the storm, and here’s what we should do to start building better structures and systems to replace the ones that won’t make it through to the other side. I don’t think we should expect more of ourselves than that, at least until the outlines of our situation become clearer.

In today’s entry, the second-last in this series, I’m not even going to do much prescription, because been there, did that. I’ve spent much of the last 10 years recommending a new purpose and business model for law firms — as you might know, I wrote a book on the subject almost three years ago.

So the first thing I’m doing today is making that book — Law Is A Buyer’s Market — essentially free for anyone who wants it. The hard-copy version is out of print, but you can download the PDF right here and distribute it as widely as you want. You can also still buy the Kindle version at Amazon, where I’ve reduced the price to US$2.99, the lowest Amazon will allow.

Secondly, I’m going to provide links to articles about law firm strategy and management that I’ve written in those intervening three years. You can consider these links to collectively constitute a de facto second edition of the book, or additional chapters that I would have included had they been written before the book was published.

1. 1. Clients. How can we prioritize our clients’ interests above all else? How to improve our law firm client experience and Is our law firm fulfilling its purpose?
   2. Service. How can we measure and improve our client service? A simple measurement of client value and As good as it gets?
   3. Business Model. How should we reconfigure the business of our firm? Rethinking law firm productivity measurement and Break the law firm business model
   4. Practice Groups. How do we manage our practice and industry groups? Law firms’ shopping mall problem
   5. Partners. How do I manage my powerful partners? Who really owns our law firm? and Don’t fear the rainmaker
   6. Associates. How should we rethink our associates and talent development? The revenue-neutral associate and Law firm culture and the “war for talent”
   7. Pricing. How should we price our services? The problem with value pricing and The rise of market pricing
   8. Compensation. How should we (not) compensate lawyers? How compensation plans are wrecking law firms
   9. Diversity. How do we completely change our approach to diversity? Law firms’ problem with women
   10. Technology. How should we incorporate AI into our firm? Getting over technology and Thinking differently about legal AI
   11. Innovation. How can I encourage more innovation in the firm? Faster horses and What will lawyers do now?
   12. Collaboration. How can I encourage more collaboration in the firm? The reality of collaboration and The price of collaboration
   13. Culture. How do we strengthen our law firm’s culture? Re-personalizing law firm culture
   14. Wellness. How can we ensure our lawyers’ wellness? Crushed and How to make less money
   15. Change Management. How can I lead change in my firm? Changing the lawyer assessment system and How to bring about change in law firms
   16. Future. How do we plan for our firm’s future? We’re here for a good time, not a long time and Fight the future
   17. The Big Picture. What does the really big picture look like for law firms? The cause of, and solution to and The new legal economy

And thirdly, in the balance of this post, I’m going to share with you my early thoughts about how this pandemic and its aftermath will eventually change the nature of law firms of all sizes, especially large full-service firms.

To be clear, this isn’t a prediction about the future of law firms — we don’t have nearly enough data yet. Nor is it a deeply detailed blueprint for the completely transformed law firm — I’m still working out what that might look like, and when I finally do, the result will probably be a major standalone article rather than a blog post. But I think I can delineate the outlines of one possible “future law firm” at this stage:

The thing about law firms is that they have always been home to two warring forces: the interests of the firm, and the interests of the firm’s individual partners. I wrote about this idea years ago here at Law21, and it constituted a cornerstone concept of Law Is A Buyer’s Market.

The interests of the firm include growing the business of the firm as a whole, building strong relationships with clients, amassing a powerful knowledge and data core, developing standalone lines of revenue independent from individual lawyers, and other goals consistent with making the firm as a business entity more capable, independent, and dominant in its chosen markets.

For the most part, the interests of individual partners run counter to these goals.

• Whereas the firm wants to strengthen ties to key clients, so as to reduce the risk that the client might someday depart the firm along with their relationship partner, the partner wants the opposite: weak ties with the firm that virtually oblige the client to follow the partner wherever they might go.
• Whereas the firm wants the partner to cross-sell the services of their colleagues in order to generate more business, the partner wants to avoid any risk that the cross-sold lawyer will disappoint the client (bad) or absolutely delight the client (maybe worse).
• Whereas the firm wants consistency of retainers, communication, pricing, and billing, in order to maximize brand value, the partner wants complete autonomy to run their business the way they want, and to keep the firm brand from overshadowing their own.
• Whereas the firm wants to grow overall revenue and profits, so that a rising tide will lift all boats, the partner doesn’t care all that much whether anyone else’s boat floats a little higher or lower, because the partner is concerned with only one vessel: their own.

You could think of these opposing forces as “centripetal,” or centralizing (the firm tries to strengthen the forces that pull key elements of the firm towards the centre), versus “centrifugal,” or decentralizing (the partners react against these efforts by asserting their own autonomy, keeping firm management within tight boundaries, and threatening to fly the coop if they don’t like how things are going).

Now, as you already know if you’ve worked in a law firm anytime during the last 30 years, individual partners have been winning the war against their firms so thoroughly that they look like the Harlem Globetrotters wiping the floor with the Washington Generals. Centrifugal > centripetal, and it hasn’t been close.

But the other premise of my book was that after countless years of ignominious defeats, the law firm as an entity was mounting a comeback. Driven by factors such as dedicated and professional leadership, the unstoppable rise of technology, and the growing power of a dominant and differentiated brand, firm managers and leaders were starting to assert more control over individual partners and enabling their firms to act more institutionally than they ever had.

And there was reason to think that the comeback was accelerating. As firms set up more subsidiaries, created more R&D functionalities, and brought in more technology-powered client-facing sources of revenue that they controlled and directed centrally, rather than being dependent on individual partners, the firm’s power base would grow and those centripetal forces would become stronger.

That was the theory, at least — a pretty good one, if you ask me. And I still think that for many types of legal service providers, that’s the model that will eventually win out. But the pandemic has exploded onto this battlefield, and in the initial stages at least, it is lending its strength to the centrifugal, decentralizing forces within law firms.

Consider some of the early impacts and likely knock-on effects of the pandemic:

• At the most basic level, physical distancing requires everybody in the firm to stay away from each other, working from home and connecting only by audio and video, thereby weakening the ties that everyday physical proximity help to bind.
• As lawyers work from home, carry out tasks, and docket their time, it becomes ever clearer to both the lawyers and the firm that billable legal work can be carried out without the firm’s active presence or involvement. Lawyers are busy; the firm is dark.
• In a crisis situation, decisions frequently have to be made on the spot with limited consultation opportunities. Lawyers really don’t like this, but they’re doing it — and as they do it successfully, their sense of autonomy and independence grows stronger.
• Firms are unlikely to press their lawyers to maximize billings during a pandemic, reducing the relentless pressure most lawyers experience. Lawyers will see that this and other supposedly “impossible” changes turned out to be possible after all, and they will remember it.
• As physical distancing relaxes or becomes less frequent as the pandemic slowly runs its painful course, a certain percentage of partners are not going to return to their offices — they’ll have made alternative arrangements that they prefer, and they will not be told when and where to go to work.
• Other lawyers and staff will follow these partners’ lead, and firms will increasingly find themselves with vacant offices in expensive high-rises. In an effort to cut their losses, they will downsize their physical footprint or convert unused offices and cubicles into high-tech conference spaces.
• Satellite offices in suburban parts of the city will soon start to spring up, where partners in a practice or industry group gather their associates and support staff. These groups had long been firms’ true power centres, and physical independence will strengthen them further.
• Law firm headquarters will become home to senior management, a few aging traditionalists, and client meeting areas. In an effort to maintain presence and relevance, these HQs will also host training academies for new hires and fully staffed R&D divisions to develop new client-facing products.
• Within three short years of the pandemic’s arrival, then, law firms could change from highly centralized collections of disparate lawyers sharing a common space and culture to hub-and-spoke arrays of high-powered legal experts held together by a valuable brand and not much else.

Again, this is just one possible path forward among many, and I want to keep these possibilities deliberately vague at this stage, because the absence of meaningful data about our current situation and immediate future renders any attempt at prediction little more than speculation.

But any one of these paths forward could spawn multiple second- and third-order effects. There’s no obvious reason, for instance, why one of these satellite offices could not be embedded onsite with a major client, or why any law firm so decentralized should bother maintaining the traditional full suite of service areas with widely varying client types and profitability levels. And what about multi-disciplinary workforces? What about non-lawyer ownership? Both of these innovations are much nearer today than they were just two short months ago.

So I invite you to use the foregoing thought exercise to consider how this pandemic — a shattering force of chaos, anxiety, dissension, fragmentation, and isolation — is likely to forever alter the trajectory of law firm transformation. Which existing virtues of law firms will the pandemic undermine? Which elements of discord will it aggravate? Or, if you prefer to approach the question more optimistically, which positive aspects will it encourage and which negative tendencies will it ameliorate?

Or — and we have to consider the possibility — will the impact of the worst worldwide health emergency in more than 100 years, coupled with a potentially Depression-scale economic contraction on a dangerously interdependent planet, simply blow “the law firm model” to pieces? And if so, what do we do next?

I don’t have answers to any of these questions yet — I’m still trying to work out the right questions to ask. My book, the foregoing links, and these last three posts are the best advice I can currently give to law firms about their eventual future state.

But I remain confident that if we can keep our core principles about the professional business of legal service, the well-being of our colleagues and employees, and the interests of our clients firmly and foremost in mind throughout this ordeal, we’ll do okay. Maybe a whole lot better than okay, in fact.

And one last piece of advice: Stay connected with each other. This pandemic, like I said, is a shattering force of dissension, and it aims to both literally and figuratively drive us apart from each other, to divide us and isolate us. In that regard, it has plenty of allies, especially in certain governments.

Whatever the merits of centrifugal force in law firms might be, I urge you to resist its rupturing and fragmenting effect in your communities and in our society. We are better together, stronger together, and strange as it might seem, healthier together. No one individual can stop COVID-19. But one whole planet can — and will.

• Part 1: What we’re up against
• Part 2: Justice system down
• Part 3: Justice reconstructed
• Part 4: Lawyer formation disrupted
• Part 5  Lawyer formation rescued
• Part 6: Lawyer formation re-engineered
• Part 7: Law firm essentials

My previous post in this series offered lawyers four suggestions for carrying out triage during these first several weeks of the pandemic. Perhaps you’ve considered those ideas, maybe adopted one or two in your law business, and hopefully have seen a few early indications that they’ll have some value.

But regardless of the methods you’ve been using to keep your law business going through the early days of this crisis, you can’t triage indefinitely. At some point, as everybody gets a little more oriented to the chaos around us, you’ll need to turn your mind to some short- and medium-term ways to solidify your law business throughout the pandemic and start transitioning your firm to the next stage of its development. That’s what I hope to tackle in this post.

I want to be clear at the start about time frames and expectations. It’s been about three weeks since I began this series with an assessment of the public-health crisis presented by SARS-CoV-2 and its implications. During that time, most countries have “bent their curve” somewhat, but only a few have flattened it, and some (like the US and Britain) sometimes appear to be aiming for the opposite effect. The chances of a quick resolution to the pandemic were always slim, but outside of a few forward-thinking and fast-acting places like South Korea and New Zealand, they now appear to be none.

So I think this is what you should probably expect: The pandemic has at least another 12 to 18 months to run before a vaccine is developed and eventually deployed. During this time, we should anticipate a deep and wide global recession compounded by rolling lockdowns, supply chain breakdowns, waves of debilitating illness, and a few potential outlier occurrences that aren’t worth serious contemplation. Actual events could take a sunnier-than-expected turn, for which we would all be grateful; but prudence would suggest assuming a less-than-optimal course ahead of us and planning accordingly.

What we’re entering, then, is kind of a “siege” period, to be followed by a long and slow recovery as we edge towards a new post-pandemic economy and society. I have no idea how long either of these periods will last, but depending on your type of work, I would operate on the assumption that a significant portion of what you’d consider your “ordinary course of business” work will be suspended for some time to come. I would go further, in fact, and build into your calculations the likelihood that although some of that work should return in the new world, a pretty decent chunk of it will not.

Nobody knows when this will be “over.” But most everyone agrees that the world we wake up to on that day will be markedly, maybe even radically different than the one we inhabited before this all started. There is no “normal” to get back to anymore. The market in which you used to sell legal services is gone, and the one that eventually replaces it — the new, new legal economy — will be sufficiently different that how you ran your business before is not how you’ll run your business then.

Therefore, both for the short- and the medium-term, you need to start making some adjustments to your law business. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll figure out which adjustments to abandon and which to keep, and to get better at the latter. Here are eight potential adjustments for your consideration, some for immediate deployment, others for further down the road.

1. Narrow or drop your ancillary work. I expect that in your law business, as in most businesses everywhere, the adage “80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your clients, and vice versa” applies. Now might be the time to finally clear out some or much of the 80% of your work that generates just 20% of your revenue. Unless that 80% includes a burgeoning area of practice that you’ve just launched and that you reasonably anticipate will survive the pandemic, this category was contributing little to your bottom line two months ago and is now probably a break-even distraction at best. In a crisis, you need to focus on essentials.

Review your last 18-24 months of financial statements and look for that 80-20 split, seeking out the backbone and beating heart of your revenue and profitability in the 20% — most likely, either a few major clients or a few select practice areas, and prioritize them. Obviously, if one of your major clients just filed for bankruptcy, don’t include it on the critical list — but do look for similar businesses in its industry that you could target, or even better, stay in touch with the principal to see if you can assist with her own transition. The range and capacity of your law business (along with your personal bandwidth) have been restricted by the pandemic; you should narrow your own focus in turn.

2. Start a government benefits practice. In an economic meltdown like this, when private businesses shut their doors and the state starts sending people money to live on, it suddenly becomes very important to know how to access government benefit programs. Unfortunately, such programs are often labyrinthine and user-hostile even at the best of times, which these are decidedly not. People have a dire and immediate need to navigate these systems, but many aren’t in a position to fully access them.

So you could become known as the go-to (or at least, a go-to) expert in your area concerning the sorts of benefits people are entitled to receive, under what circumstances they can be accessed, and how to actually navigate all the obstacles and red tape to obtain them. Many clients might be glad to have a lawyer handle the whole process for them for an affordable flat fee. If you get enough business of this type and develop robust routines for accessing benefits, you could even automate, scale, and expand the geographic scope of this work beyond your region.

3. Take on the government as a client. The flip side of the previous coin is that the government (federal, state/provincial, and municipal) is going to be taking on many more responsibilities in the next year or two. This includes not just making financial payments, but also issuing health-care directives, criminalizing (or de-criminalizing) certain activities, vastly increasing taxing powers (all that benefit money has to come from somewhere), and so forth. But few government legal departments have anywhere near the capacity for this type of mandate expansion.

Enter your law business: Working on a contract or agency basis, for a reasonable monthly fee, you could take on many legal aspects of the increased government role. Don’t underestimate the potential here: Although nobody wants and few people seriously expect another Great Depression, remember how much the role of the government expanded with the New Deal in the 1930s. It is plausible that a Green New Deal, or variations in other countries, might be in the works a year from now. Your law business could start today to develop the relationships needed to get some of that work.

4. Become a business conversion expert. Auto manufacturers making ventilators? Liquor companies making hand sanitizer? Clothing stores making masks? Even if some of these stories are a little over-sold, the fact is that many businesses whose usual customer base has disappeared during this crisis are trying to shift gears to meet rapidly rising pandemic-driven demand in other areas. But there’s more involved in this kind of strategy than just the mechanical and procedural adjustments (which are all difficult enough). There’s also the legal aspects.

Businesses attempting to switch their production lines virtually overnight need rapid assistance with obtaining permits, getting environmental clearances, acquiring export licenses, getting employees trained and licensed, and so on — and you could be their legal counsel. You might even use your experiences here to start a series of podcasts or webinars in which you advise businesses considering such transitions about the issues they need to deal with, thereby creating potential clients in a whole new market for legal services that you’ve effectively invented.

5. Form a Mastermind group. Maybe you’ve already heard of Mastermind groups, helpfully defined by Wikipedia as “peer-to-peer mentoring groups used to help members solve their problems with input and advice from the other group members.” The concept is nearly 100 years old — interestingly, it was first coined shortly before the Wall Street crash of 1929. But Mastermind groups have become popular recently as a forum in which several people rely on each other for insights and directions, usually in a business context.

Why would this matter to you? Because Mastermind groups need a facilitator — someone who gathers the members together, conducts or leads the conversations, ensures that everyone gets a chance to say their piece, offers timely advice and insight, and keeps the conversations motoring along. Think about clients who share a common industry or personal issue, whether it’s CEOs or newly divorced parents. Think about Zoom meetings where they share their worries and solutions in a safe and confidential environment, hosted by a trusted advisor who charges them a monthly fee to organize and run their meetings. Now could be just the moment to try this out.

6. Do as much as you can on a flat-fee basis. Your clients, I’ll assume, have never liked being billed by the hour. I’d venture a guess that you and the other lawyers around you don’t love it, either. But you’ve all felt like you were stuck with it. Right now is your opportunity to finally change that — to run an experiment in real time to see whether flat-fee billing is practical, viable, and profitable. As I discussed in the previous post, offer to set up informal arrangements with your clients to do what you can for them in exchange for a digitally deposited monthly fee. You should get at least a few takers.

Continue to record the time you spend on these files, but only for your own internal review. Make contemporaneous notes about how productive you feel when working “off the clock.” At the end of each month, run the numbers on the flat-fee work and compare it to the hourly billed files. Which generated more revenue and profit? Which did you enjoy more? Which rewarded you for getting the job done faster and moving to the next thing? How did the client feel? How could you make the flat-fee work more profitable? Some legal tasks in the future, to be sure, will still be done hourly; but much of what lawyers do will be flat-fee. Start training your law business for this future now.

7. Build social capital. Even with all these activities and other billable work, odds are you’ll still have some professional time to fill. Now might therefore be an opportunity to build your social capital by reaching out to other members of your community, both legal and otherwise, and help to “produce public goods for a common good.” In a pandemic, there’ll be no shortage of ways in which you can meet local needs, help the less fortunate, create community value, and strengthen your networks of relationships. You do these things, of course, because it’s the right thing to do, especially in a crisis. But there are tangible long-term benefits to your law business, too.

In his terrific new book Lawyer Forward, Mike Whelan explains the meaning of social capital in the legal sector context. “The problem with the modern world is that we tend to ignore just how connected we all are,” he writes. “When we resist the isolating pressure of the traditional law firm model and instead connect with our communities, we’re creating opportunities for cooperation. That may look like friendship, or lawyer-client relationships, or leadership. However you build your social capital, you’re gathering a cooperative tribe.” Find your tribe and seek out opportunities to contribute to it, and perhaps even to lead it.

8. Put your employees on the innovation file. Even if every one of these suggestions pans out, you might still have under-utilized people at your firm, especially junior lawyers or support staff. The answer, as we discussed in the last post, is not to lay them off. It’s to get them busy modernizing your law business so that it’s ready for the post-COVID world. So put these people in charge of the following projects (if your business hasn’t taken these steps already) and have them report their progress to you on a monthly basis:

• Enable electronic billing and payment
• Move all your documents and data to the cloud
• Refresh your website content in light of the pandemic
• Investigate technology for carrying out basic legal tasks
• Revise your internal processes for greater efficiency
• Assemble detailed client intelligence databases
• Run the numbers to calculate client and practice profitability

Many of these items might have been sitting on your “I Probably Should Do That Someday” list, but you and your people were too busy to get around to it. Well, today is Someday. Just as is the case with flat-fee pricing, all the foregoing elements are not going to be competitive advantages in the next legal market — they’re going to be business as usual. You need to be 100% ready to roll out a modern, 21st-century law business when the pandemic finally ends and a different legal world emerges. You can’t put off starting that process until the all-clear is finally given — this is one curve you need to be ahead of.

The reality is, there are a lot of ups and downs ahead of us. Lockdowns will be relaxed, then reinstated when it becomes clear we ventured back outside too soon. Illness will sweep through your own family or workplace, if it hasn’t already, shunting everything else to one side. In this extremely volatile environment, significant political, economic or environmental incidents will generate impacts far beyond what would normally be the case. Everyone is on an emotional roller-coaster ride of unknown duration, and as you and I can both testify, that wears us all down sooner or later.

So my final thought is to remember that no matter how important our work might seem to us, it’s not life. “Work-life balance” was always an insidious term that invited us to view these two concepts as opposing sides of the same coin. But life is a multi-faceted cube, not a coin, and work is just one side. Take a deep breath and remember: Everyone is in the same boat. Nobody has all the answers, and we’re all making mistakes every day as we plow into utterly uncharted territory. And that’s okay.

We’re on a long road to somewhere brand new, and we can’t see the end of it — but I guarantee you, there is an end to it, and we will get there. Set out on that road with patience, generosity of spirit, plenty of forgiveness, and a desire to make things a little better at each turn. Before you know it, you’ll have a large group of followers around you. Because that’s how you lead people through a crisis.

• Part 1 in this series: What we’re up against
• Part 2 in this series: Justice system down
• Part 3 in this series: Justice reconstructed
• Part 4 in this series: Lawyer formation disrupted
• Part 5 in this series: Lawyer formation rescued
• Part 6 in this series: Lawyer formation re-engineered

So, what about law firms? What will the pandemic and its associated economic crisis do to private practitioners of law? Well, first we need to separate out the two law firm sectors: larger firms with mostly corporate and institutional clients, and smaller firms (including solos) with mostly individual and small-business clients.

Perhaps surprisingly to some, I’m not going to spend much time on large firms or the AmLaw 200. As a group, they have large full-time professional management teams, and they’re diversified enough that at least one or two of their revenue engines are still working even in this crisis. Most importantly, they have immense amounts of cushion: When the average partner at your firm takes home half a million a year, or twice that, or four times that, you don’t have existential concerns. You have profit-distribution issues, sure, and some challenges around shareholder expectations, but those are textbook examples of “nice problems to have.”

Maybe more to the point, there are plenty of people out there offering advice to this segment of the market and covering their challenges in detail, and I see no need to add to that. But smaller firms don’t get that level of attention (with some noteworthy exceptions), and speaking generally, their challenges are greater and more urgent. So I’ll focus the balance of my remarks on this sector, with occasional reference to larger firms insofar as it might be helpful.

The pattern of these posts so far has been to identify the existing fault lines in a given part of the legal economy and talk about how the pandemic has struck and caused irreparable damage along those fault lines. But the cracks in the law firm model is a subject I’ve been writing about here at Law21 for more than 10 years, and I don’t see much point in rehashing it now. Sometime next week, I’ll put together a collection of my posts advising how to build a better law firm model and post that for people to review if they like.

So the primary focus of this post will be: What can smaller law firms do, right now, to deal with the impact of this unprecedented global crisis? My advice is to focus on the absolute essentials, so what follows is going to be very stripped-down and basic. (Okay, it’s 3,000 words long, so it’s not that stripped down, but still.)

I’d suggest thinking of this challenge in terms of four concentric circles, moving from innermost to outermost, and dealing with each circle in turn — as you secure one, you can move out to the next one. If I could draw, I’d include an illustration of how the fourth circle bends back to support the previous three, but I have no such skills. so you’ll have to imagine it. Sorry.

First Circle: You. Nobody else’s welfare is more critical to address at the start of this process than you, the lawyer. Doesn’t matter if you’re a true solo, if you have a few partners and employees, or even if you’re in a mega-firm — you cannot serve clients or put out fires or do anything to help anyone else unless you have done what you can to solidify yourself. You, personally, are the cornerstone of you, professionally. Deal with yourself first.

It bears repeating: We are in a global pandemic. Millions of people worldwide are going to die from the COVID-19 virus in the next two years. The global economy is going to experience contractions and convulsions on a scale most of us have never seen. That’s reality, it’s horrific, and it intrudes on our consciousness overtly and covertly multiple times a day. It’s an ongoing trauma that distresses you and steals your peace of mind whether you notice it or not.

So even though your inbox is constantly pinging and people are calling or knocking at your door, even though your kids are at home and loudly protesting their online learning sessions — even though you feel like everybody needs a piece of you right now, call time out.

Take some foundational steps to secure your emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. Get 30 minutes of exercise a day if permitted and possible, walking around your block or neighbourhood, ideally getting some sun and Vitamin D. Pray or meditate for 10 minutes once a day, morning or evening (or both, if you can). Avoid doomsurfing. Eat as well as you can; if you drink alcohol, cut back sharply. If you feel like crying, do it. If you have people nearby you can hug, do it, often.

This is not selfishness; this is solidifying the foundation of your personal and professional life, so that you have the capacity to do what else needs to be done. You’re a human being going through incredible stress — recognize, acknowledge, and accept that you will be buffeted and damaged by this storm. The strongest people are those who accept themselves as they are when they’re weakened and damaged, and then shore themselves up as needed.

Second Circle: Your Professional Dependents. I wish I could come up with a better term for this one, but my nomenclature skills have been among the first to desert me. I’m speaking here of the people whose livelihoods depend on or are in a substantial way affected by your law business. That would include employees like secretaries, law clerks, paralegals, receptionists, and associates; it could also include, in a more distant way, more independent players like junior partners or freelance researchers or the communications firm to whom you’ve outsourced your marketing.

Now, these people are not (in most cases) your children or blood relatives, and you’re not responsible for their lives. But they depend on the law business you run to support their own lives to a greater or lesser extent, and they’ve been worrying since the onset of this crisis whether you’re going to cut their pay, cut their hours, or cut them loose altogether. If you haven’t addressed them openly about this yet, today is not too late to do it.

You might not have any bad news at all, of course. The nature of your law business might be such that you’re swamped with client inquiries and billable work, and if so, great — your challenge here will be getting the productivity and performance you need from people who also are deeply stressed by the crisis and who might have family members or close friends in hospital. But even then, many clients will not be in a position to pay you in full or on time. And in all other cases, there simply won’t be as much work as you’ve had in the past.

Opinions will differ here, and the right call will always depend on your particular circumstances. But generally, I believe that you should do whatever you can to shelter these people from the storm and absorb at least some of its fury. Keep them on payroll as long as you can; if you must reduce their pay, cut it by less than what you expect your own earnings to suffer; if you absolutely must lay them off, help them access all available government subsidies for people in their situation. Look after them as best as you reasonably can.

Don’t go about this process by yourself and then announce your decisions to them — get them involved, in one-on-one conversations (you almost certainly can’t do it in person, but a video call is far preferable to a phone conversation here). Be honest and transparent about the situation, ask them to be equally open about their own needs and situations, and talk it all out. Help them determine the nature, timing, and length of any reductions you need to make. Give them agency in this process — they deserve it.

Equally importantly, if you do need to cut back or even cut out their contribution, check in on them regularly to the extent possible. Ask how they are, how their family is doing, do they have relatives who are ill or quarantined, is there anything they need that you can help them with? In many cases, these people will be more vulnerable than you are and they live closer to the edge. Make sure they know that if the edge gets too close, they can call on you.

Obviously there are retention and recruitment advantages to behaving in this manner — you’ll earn unquantifiable amounts of loyalty and positive word of mouth by being a great boss in this crisis.  But the reason you’re doing it is simply because that’s what good people do — what leaders do — in a crisis when others look to them and rely on them for guidance and assistance and strength.

Third Circle: Your Clients. I suppose that this is functionally the same as saying “Your Business,” because looking after one means looking after the other. But clients and your relationships with them are the heart and soul of your law business, and you should start there.

Right now is when you should be doubling down on your most important client relationships. Reach out to these clients (or if it’s a business or organization, the key contact(s) within the client) and ask, first of all, “How are you?” And mean it. And listen closely to the answer. This one action alone will set you apart from most people in the client’s professional life, and maybe quite a few on the personal side. (If you have numerous clients of roughly equal value, send these questions in an email and ask those who can or wish to reply.)

Then ask, “How can I help you? And I don’t just mean with legal problems — what’s really worrying you? What’s heaviest on your mind? Maybe I can find someone to help.” Or better again, depending on how the client has answered the previous question, say, “I think I can help you with that situation.” It’s more effective to offer specific assistance than ask about general needs.

I want to emphasize the part about “not just legal.” Most clients, if their lawyer offers to help, will assume “legal help” is meant, and they will probably imagine a very narrow range of activities and say no, I’m fine. But as access-to-justice studies have shown us, people often don’t know that a given problem has a legal angle and a legal solution. So ask, open-ended, what’s causing you anxiety or concern? And even if their worries have no legal angles, maybe you know someone who can help them anyway.

In a crisis like this, we remember the people who didn’t wait for us to call them — they reached out to us, they genuinely inquired after our welfare, they offered to do anything to help, and they were sincere. That’s how you further secure and deepen your client relationships — that’s platinum currency. Clients generally stay put in a crisis. But whether they stay afterwards depends on what firms do during it.

There are two other obvious benefits here. One is that it’s an opportunity to ask about which ongoing or upcoming legal matters can be put aside or adjusted in light of the crisis, and that will help you triage and prioritize your own to-do list, which you absolutely need to do. But the other, and more important one, is that it helps generate payable activity. And that brings us to the fourth circle.

Fourth Circle: Cash. I’ve left this category for last because logistically and chronologically, it’s the last item to be looked after — but in terms of importance, it might as well be first. You need to get money flowing into your firm, as soon as possible, with some degree of regularity or predictability. You might be in great emotional health and in the running for  “Boss of the Year” and the apple of your clients’ eye — but if your firm runs out of cash, none of that matters.

I want to be clear about just how difficult it might prove to be to get cash into your firm. The economy is in ruins. Real unemployment is certainly in double digits, with some estimates suggesting 20% or 30% in the second quarter. Nearly 10 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the space of two weeks. Governments are providing benefits to many laid-off workers, but that money is mostly going to food and rent. Few small businesses are essential and most have closed. There’s a lot of law firms out there representing restaurants and dry cleaners and landscape companies and the like, and these businesses are on life support.

The average law firm bills clients for work roughly within 30 days of performance, and it gets paid roughly an average of 90 days later. Any unpaid invoices for work done since the start of the year are very likely sitting at the bottom of the pile of bills on your clients’ kitchen tables, and will be for some time to come. That suggests there’s a four-to-six-month gap coming up in your cashflow, and few firms can endure that without significant damage, or worse.

So you should think about doing two things. One is to speed up the process by which you get paid. If you don’t have electronic payments or credit card payments or other online payment systems set up, well, a pandemic is really not a great time to do it. But you need to shorten the turnaround time and lessen the hassle of getting client money into your bank. Find an online payment provider that works with the legal profession to set you up. I’ve heard good things about LawPay, and I’m sure Clio would be happy to help. If you’re really stuck, call your nearest bar association or practice advisor and ask them to help.

The other is connected with those client conversations I mentioned. Near the end of those discussions, raise the matter of payments. You are running a business and you have every right and every necessity to broach the subject with clients, awkward as it might make you feel. But there are ways to make it easier. Here’s my suggestion.

Offer your clients a “crisis billing arrangement.” For any matters arising in any way out of the pandemic and recession, your firm will bill no hours — instead, the client will pay a special monthly “pandemic flat rate,” on the lower end of your billing scale, with a unique billing code that all timekeepers can use for these matters.

You can, if you wish, apply this rate to everything you do for every client, but you don’t need to. If you’re working on a pre-existing matter for the client, or on a matter separate and apart from the crisis, you can specify that the usual billing and rates apply — but everything else is done under the “emergency arrangement,” paid automatically online on the first of every month directly to your bank.

I suggest that you not try to set limits on the amount of work you’ll do under the pandemic flat rate — that could blunt its effectiveness and put a chill on the conversation. Instead, tell the client that some months will be busier and others will be lighter and they’ll even out over time — but if unexpectedly, the amount of work starts heavy and gets heavier than anticipated, you’ll call the client back and raise it and talk about adjusting the rate to reflect the extensive good work you’re doing. (And if the work starts light and gets lighter, call the client and reduce the amount unilaterally.)

There are two broad reasons to do this. One, of course, is that it gets cash in the door, every month, at a vastly accelerated rate — you have guaranteed income and you can plan out your own payments accordingly. It also makes timekeeping and billing much easier, especially with most lawyers working from home, where they tend to docket less frequently anyway. For all you know, both clients and lawyers might prefer this method and will keep it even after the crisis ends, in which case your cashflow situation steadies permanently.

And the other reason is that it strengthens the client relationship through honesty and openness — you treated the client like an adult who understands very well how difficult life is for everyone.  And when you set a lower-than-normal rate, it shows the client that you’re not out to make money off this crisis or bleed the client at a time when it’s also running short on cash (as everyone is) — you’re only looking to keep the wheels turning so that everyone can get through this in one piece.

= = = = = = = = = = =

This was a great many words to say a fairly straightforward thing: In a crisis, you learn very quickly what really matters. To my mind, what matters to your law business are:

• you, the lawyer;
• the people who depend on you;
• the clients on whom you depend; and
• the cash that keeps your business breathing.

Your bandwidth and your window of attention have probably gotten much smaller lately. I know mine have. So I want to urge you against undertaking massive renovations to your law firm business model at this time. My previous posts about the court system and the lawyer formation process both emphasized short-term triage activities before turning to big-picture issues. But complex legal systems have many stakeholders who can lend a hand. You have very few.

So focus on the essentials. Take care of yourself and those close to you. Stay in touch with your clients and do as much as you can for them. Ensure a steady flow of cash into your business so that it can live to serve another day. And at the end of each day, be at peace that you’ve done what you could as a lawyer, and be with your family and support network. We’re all in this together. And together is how we’ll all get out of it.