Clio`s second briefing on the impact of COVID-19 shows several weeks of decline in law firm activity, which had an impact on monthly billing volume. First data. As one Advocate General put it: “There are many possibilities. I firmly believe that COVID and the lockdown have really pushed the agenda forward for many of us in legal services across the country. We just have to build on that. After all, we are unlikely to return to normal. U.S. law firms have seen a nearly one-third drop in the production of new materials since the beginning of the year due to the impact of the coronavirus. For lawyers, the challenges of the past two years offer us “an exciting opportunity to solve the most pressing problems facing our world today,” said Wilkins, associate dean of Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School.
“But it`s also a challenge because lawyers and law firms or legal departments have fundamentally had to adapt and change the way they`ve always worked” – mainly by working remotely, rather than in an office with colleagues, holding online meetings and learning how to try cases and effectively present hearings through Zoom or other online platforms. In recent years, seismic events have overlapped powerfully and contributed to a huge demand for legal services, says Professor David Wilkins `80, faculty director of the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, a research organization dedicated to providing a deeper understanding of the rapidly evolving global advocacy. He cites the global health crisis; a complex global economic crisis resulting from the pandemic and other disruptions, including the war in Ukraine; and increasingly urgent demands around the world for social and racial justice, sustainability and economic equality. Globalization, technology and demands for social justice — important trends before 2020 — have been “turbocharged” by the pandemic and other events this year, including the murder of George Floyd, Wilkins says. This increased awareness, in turn, creates new opportunities for legal operations teams to attract the attention of senior management. “Many people have told us that the crisis has led us to focus on ways of working and transforming,” said Kate Bassett, Global Head of Legal Project Management and Process Improvement at Ashurst. “This makes this period even more of an opportunity for the legal operations community to gain influence for their programs and to have the ear of decision-makers.” When the profession faced an unprecedented health crisis, calls for more diversity, justice and inclusion (DCI) were stronger than ever. The report notes that many trends have emerged in this profession over the past decade – some encouraging and some worrying. The shock to the global economy caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a 40% drop in the number of new court cases opened. At the same time, the pandemic has put enormous pressure on the services of legal aid agencies that offer free or low-cost legal representation. According to HLS` Office of Clinical and Pro Bono Program, the number of requests from people seeking legal assistance has more than tripled since 2020.
Yet, he adds, “it`s too simplistic to say, without limitation, that [the pandemic] has fundamentally accelerated the adoption of technology.” Videoconferencing has been used in some courts since the 1980s, he points out, and he sees today`s online jurisprudence not as a technological breakthrough, but simply as the same things in a different way. Real technological breakthroughs in the legal industry — such as the use of artificial intelligence — have taken a back seat for the time being due to the pandemic, Susskind says. Clio`s first briefing on the impact of COVID-19 shows that lawyers are significantly affected by social restrictions and that, despite the continued need for .. For most of the lawyers Ashurst spoke to, the initial “response phase” to COVID-19 involved the rapid implementation of crisis management plans designed to enable business resilience across the legal department. These included, for example, the transition to virtual governance and stakeholder engagement, as office closures, social distancing and on-site hold measures became the norm. Ensuring that in-house legal teams and external consultants had access to technology platforms that could enable effective remote work also quickly became a priority. As we have already mentioned, many clients have told us how the pandemic has led to an accelerated digitization of legal affairs. While the underrepresentation of people of color in the legal profession is worrisome, the National Association for Law Placement`s (NALP) 2020 report on diversity in U.S. law firms found that, for the first time, more than 10 percent of all law firm partners were lawyers of color. In 2009, only 6% of law firm partners were people of colour. The number of new legal cases in the first four months of 2020 decreased significantly compared to the previous year, like the world.
While they may not be facing the challenges of those most affected by the pandemic, many lawyers still found themselves at their peak, working from home, supervising children who couldn`t go to school, and treating health issues, their own or others. And even before that, the younger generation of lawyers, like other millennials, resisted long-standing elements of the practice of big law, such as brutally long working hours. Over the past two years, legal leaders have become more concerned with how to attract and retain top talent. The legal industry has long relied on paper checks and manual processes to manage billing and invoicing. However, as technology becomes more integrated into law firm processes, more and more companies are turning to automated payments, especially with the advent of a remote and hybrid workforce. As we have discussed in previous articles, people of color continue to be underrepresented in the legal profession. And for black and Native American lawyers, their representation is declining. Read the latest updates on Clio`s research on the current state of legal services. Regular briefings include findings and in-depth updates on Clio`s app data search — based on aggregated, anonymized data from tens of thousands of lawyers — as well as surveys of U.S. attorneys and consumers.
Last spring, Westfahl and Farayi Chipungu, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, co-taught the first adaptive leadership course at Harvard Law School.