Samira Nazem was stressed. She had worked as a summer associate in legacy Lovell's Chicago office and was set to join the firm after law school, but when the firm closed the office in 2010, in the midst of the Great Recession, her plans went up in smoke and she was forced to chart a new career path.

With the help of a stipend from the firm, Nazem spent a year on an externship at a legal aid organization and never looked back. She's now the pro bono director at the Chicago Bar Foundation and says having the rug pulled out from under her was the best thing that could have happened, in retrospect.

As the country plunges into another recession, law firms have yet to announce the type of sweeping layoffs and deferrals they did a decade ago, but many young lawyers are likely to be put in a similar position to Nazem. Several firms have pushed back their first-year start dates to January 2021. Already, the Association of Pro Bono Counsel is working to determine how best to match potential deferrals with legal aid organizations, according to Leah Medway, a board member at the organization and pro bono counsel at Perkins Coie.

For those whose career trajectories may be diverted by the coronavirus crisis, lawyers like Nazem offer an optimistic view on such a detour.

Randy Tyler was planning to work at Perkins Coie after he graduated in 2009, but instead took the firm up on its offer to defer for a year and work in public interest with a stipend. He took a fellowship at the American Civil Liberties Union chapter in Washington state, focused primarily on surveillance-related issues, and came back to the firm a year later with experience that allowed him to focus his attention where he wanted it. He's now a litigation and privacy and security partner.

"Without this experience, I don't know if I would have been able to practice in the area that I'm in," Tyler says. "It gave me more direct insight into the law and how it operates, and it made me a thousand times better as an attorney."

Tyler's Perkins Coie colleague Rike Connelly, a civil litigation partner, spent her deferral year at the Federal Public Defender of Western Washington, where she got the type of real-world experience that can be hard to come by for first-years. She says it helped her develop her skills much more quickly than she could have in a firm environment, and it "absolutely" made her a better lawyer.

Faiz Ahmad, an M&A partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, was a sixth-year associate when the Great Recession hit. His busy slate of work immediately vanished. "It was almost as if somebody turned off a switch," he says.

In his newfound free time at the office, Ahmad began watching TED Talks and was inspired to leave the firm for a year to work in Nairobi, Kenya, at Acumen Fund, a nonprofit investment fund that aims to find sustainable solutions to the problems created by poverty. He says the public interest experience was invaluable. "It gave me confidence that I had good judgment, that I could figure things out on my own, that I could be a really good lawyer and trusted adviser," he says. And by 2017, Ahmad made partner.

No lawyer will welcome a layoff or deferral, but they can at least look to a silver lining.

"Sometimes catastrophes can force you to be a little more innovative and creative in thinking about what your job might look like," Nazem says.