As more lawyers and legal staff work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, many are having to deal with the intermittent freezing and lagging of firm-provided software. But law firm chief information officers (CIOs) say the problem stems from bogged-down internet service providers (ISP), which is a function that's out of their hands.

Duane Morris CIO John Sroka said his firm's transition from averaging roughly 250 attorneys working remotely to nearly 1,200 was a fairly smooth shift. Purchasing additional software and providing training was enough to prepare the firm, he noted. However, Sroka did hear concerns from staffers and attorneys that home internet connections weren't up to par for their workloads.

"The only time there were issues, and this was early on, was when the internet providers were being really bogged down," Sroka said.

Of course, the legal industry is not alone in its sudden shift to remote working in light of local governments' enforcing social distancing protocols. But Kelley Drye & Warren chief information officer Judith Flournoy said that lawyers aren't only competing with their neighbors for internet speeds. She noted that many staffers and lawyers are working from home alongside their spouses and children who were also uprooted from their classrooms to video conference-based learning.

"There's a little bit of contention over the availability of bandwidth," she said. "They are on the same network; the ISPs [internet service providers] didn't necessarily have a scale-up plan for an event like this."

For Perkins Coie chief information officer Rick Howell, who got the 1,100 attorney firm working remotely in 10 days, he's seen slow internet complaints mostly from attorneys and staffers who work in densely populated areas.

To combat congested internet, the firm provides bandwidth test tools to its data center and staff to determine where the problem is occurring, Howell said. If it's a local disruption, the firm provides the staffer or lawyer with a mobile WiFi (MiFi) hot spot. When there's trouble moving large files, the firm will connect the user to a virtual desktop infrastructure, so the traffic stays in Perkins Coie's data center, he added. 

To be sure, legal industry observers predicted that as more law firms switch to remotely working, slow internet speeds would impact productivity.

But McNees Wallace & Nurick chief information officer Stephen Sobotta said slower internet hasn't impacted the firm's productivity as it works remotely. Instead, staffers and lawyers have learned to work through it.

"The flexibility of our users has been such that they understand and accept those little minor inconveniences like the cursor moving a little slower because they know they have the ability to support clients on a daily basis and their systems will be operational and reliable," he said. "They may not just be 100% as they were in the office."