Workers build an emergency field hospital in Central Park in New York on March 30. Photo: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg.

Editor's note: This column, written in early April, appears in the May issue of The American Lawyer magazine. 

I am sitting on my bed in my New York apartment on the Upper West Side struggling mightily to write this column. My editors are getting impatient. But I can barely define a topic, much less zip out a finished draft.

This is why I'm paralyzed: I can't think of a thing to opine about that will have a stitch of urgency a month from now. Today is April 2, and the world is coming apart. So far, more than 2,000 people in New York City have died from the coronavirus, and the White House is projecting 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the United States before it's all over. And Central Park, which I have the privilege of seeing from my window, is now the site of hospital tents set up in anticipation of a patient overflow. It all looks and feels like a battlefield—but one where the ravages are still unknown.

By the time you read this, the world will have changed in ways that we can't imagine at the current moment. I don't know which of my friends, family members or colleagues will get COVID-19. I don't know if I will be among those stricken. All I know is that we will hear bad news.

Against this backdrop, it's hard not to regard many of our pre-coronavirus concerns as small, trivial and beside the point. I find that especially true for the sector of the legal profession that I cover—that elite, hyper-competitive world that we call Big Law.

The world of major law firms has always struck me as vainglorious. All that preoccupation with the indicia of achievement—where you went to law school, whether you graded on or wrote onto the law review, whether you clerked for a federal judge, how prestigious your firm is. We've always known deep down that those badges are silly. But now the ridiculousness seems to be in sharp relief.

Ironically, just as the peak of the pandemic is expected to hit, we're unveiling the Am Law 100—that much-ballyhooed annual ranking of America's biggest, most prestigious, most profitable firms. In normal times, that would be the talk of the day.

In any other year, it would seem perfectly normal for the Big Law community to obsess over things like profits per equity partner, revenue per lawyer and all the other measures of a firm's financial success or decline. As watchers of this insular community, we are transfixed by how much partners make and which firms have reached the Super Rich status this year. Each year, you can almost hear the collective gasp that accompanies the list of firms that have reached new heights in PEP. Is it possible that three more firms have surpassed the $4 million PEP mark? Then, there's the schadenfreude about the fallen fortunes of firms that soared too high too fast.

We sift through all the data as if we're searching for oracles. We weigh the numbers, talk about the importance of RPL over PEP, prattle on about "bench strength" and firm strategy—all the usual industry bullshit. As if such things are critical. As if any of us have a clue what we're doing.

It was fun while it lasted, but that game now feels tiresome. So forgive me if I'm at loss for a riveting topic.

Contact Vivia Chen at [email protected]. On Twitter: @lawcareerist