Understand Your Rights. Solve Your Legal Problems
Paul Kelly, Partner and Head of Employment at Blacks Solicitors
Law firms, especially smaller and medium-sized practices, have had to adapt to more flexible models of working in a very short space of time as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. This will have been an incentive for many law firms, who generally operate along very traditional office-based models, to invest in flexible working, remote working and better IT systems.
Many senior lawyers and law firm owners have perhaps in the past dismissed modern ways of working and have been slower than most professions to embrace technology, often due to cost and the uncertainty of the return on investment. But, given the seismic shift of the last few weeks, we have witnessed firms who have previously been reluctant to introduce flexible working, move their whole workforce to a ‘working from home’ model and see it work.
Necessity is the mother of invention and I think it is fairly safe to say that the way law firms work will never be the same when the COVID-19 crisis is over.
COVID-19 is the perfect example of why law firms need to have in place a comprehensive disaster recovery plan and the facility to enable staff to work remotely as seamlessly as possible. In a profession where time is quite literally money, the last few weeks have shown us how by investing time in planning for the worst, business interruption can be kept to an absolute minimum. Firms who took the time to plan ahead have found that the migration to home working for their staff has been less traumatic than for those who never gave it a second thought.
Necessity is the mother of invention and I think it is fairly safe to say that the way law firms work will never be the same when the COVID-19 crisis is over. The challenge for law firms is to harness the positive momentum to encourage more flexible ways of working and use of legal tech.
