This month, partners at O'Melveny & Myers' partnership reelected chairman Bradley Butwin to serve a third four-year term, ensuring that he will lead the firm into 2025.

Ensconced in his Long Island home with his sprawling family, Butwin spoke with The American Lawyer about the challenges his firm faces from COVID-19 and his goals for the firm once the world emerges from the grip of the pandemic. Butwin also confirmed that O'Melveny & Myers has managed to avoid any cuts to compensation or staffing at the 670-attorney international firm. And, when underscoring how vital communication is in the current moment, he shared how the firm is trying to keep staying in touch remotely from getting boring. 

Congratulations on your reelection, Brad. What does the fact that the partnership has entrusted you to lead the firm for nearly five more years mean to you?

I appreciate the trust my partners have placed in me. Serving as chair is an opportunity to give back to this great firm I love and to the clients who rely on us, be they our commercial clients or those we represent pro bono. I'm proud that the firm is such a strong firm today, but our accomplishments are not mine. They're all team accomplishments.

Let's talk about the immediate reality first and then move on to the longer run. What lessons has the firm learned from the disruptions and dislocations of the last three months, and what impact is this going to have on how you structure work moving forward?

We are in uncharted territory. No one really knows what the world will look like tomorrow, let alone three months or three years from now. At the outbreak of this terrible virus, we quickly assembled a formalized coronavirus task force led by Lisa Monaco, Homeland Security adviser under President Obama and the head of the ebola task force. When California Gov. Gavin Newsom needed to secure additional hospital beds by reopening a shuttered hospital in LA and by revitalizing an underutilized facility in the Bay Area, he turned to our restructuring and health care teams. Addressing health concerns of this magnitude can typically take months, but our O'Melveny team worked with the state's team around the clock to find a solution in a matter of days.

We have one of very best litigation practices in the U.S., which tends to be a countercyclical practice. And we also have top restructuring, labor and employment, insurance and finance practices. I don't mean to suggest that this pandemic is a great thing for business. We know it's a horrific thing for society. But I like our mix, I like our teamwork, I like our cohesion. 

When we talked in February, you mentioned that 38 cases were slated to go to trial this year. Are the delays here a cause of concern when it comes to the firm's financial performance?

Not in the long term. We have had cases that have been put on hold. I don't see those cases going away. We don't live month to month, and so it's not a concern if the trial takes place a few months from now rather than last month. We would like the courts to open. I know the courts would like to open. And when they do, I think we'll see a major uptick. 

Have you started to think about having people return to offices or even preparing for it, and what's it going to look like?

I think there are different geographies that pose different challenges. I am personally most concerned with the safety of our people who rely on public transportation. That needs to be sorted out before I have a comfort level that our people are going to be safe. And I have not seen a plan yet. 

How have you been able to avoid making any changes [to compensation or staffing] up to this point?

It's not something you do lightly. We're in this for the long haul. We cherish our people, and we are committed to doing all we can to protect them. Law firms are not immune to the unpredictable risks to our economy, and I don't think there's any law firm that can talk about any guarantees for their business levels in any particular short-term period. But over the long haul, we feel good.

Looking to the longer term, what does the future look like and what are the firm's strategic priorities?

We recently completed a firmwide strategic planning process, and we've established five key priorities that will help guide our work for the foreseeable future. 

First is to expand our work with clients across even more practices and geographies. While we always welcome new clients, our primary focus is on deepening and expanding our partnerships with the loyal clients we are already partnering with. 

A second priority is to expand our market leadership in certain areas. The five practices in which we're going to stake out or expand our leadership positions are trial work and high-stakes litigation, restructuring, infrastructure, technology and middle-market corporate work. The five industry segments where we see growing client demand are health care and life sciences, fintech, transportation, entertainment, and water, and within entertainment, I'll include sports and video gaming. 

Third, we'll strengthen our firmwide platform by investing in areas of strength, including new lateral hires. 

A fourth priority is to improve our already very strong culture by continuing our focus on diversity and inclusion, where we've made great progress; internal and client-based succession planning; platforming opportunities for our junior partners and counsel; and collaborating with our associates of counsel to make their experience as rewarding as possible.  

And the fifth priority will be to continue to make bold investments—in innovation, in practice, in technology and service delivery—to offer more efficient client service and to ensure that the legal marketplace's evolution is a competitive advantage for us, not merely a challenge.

Prediction is a fool's game. No one fully saw the scope of the coronavirus coming. That said, in five years, at the end of your next term, what do you expect the legal industry to look like?

I think your question is premature. I will say that as we speak, we are doing a 360 review. Every period like this brings changes that make firms better. If you look at the financial crisis, many firms, not just us, were able to be smart about being cleaner and neater and more efficient. I think that will happen here too. 

There is a laundry list of things that can change. We actually have a couple of really big leases coming up shortly: our two biggest are in LA and in New York. Even before the crisis, you had firms talking about their real estate footprint. But what's interesting is that what you heard people talking about were hotelling arrangements and bullpens and big areas. Well, I'm not sure that is matching social distancing. Now, at least, when we look at our two biggest leases, we'll have the benefit of seeing how the remote work has worked, and it's worked fine. I think our communication has been better since the shutdown than it was before. 

What has the firm's internal communication strategy been in order to keep everyone on the same page through all this?

You cannot communicate enough. In times like these today with all of us still physically distant, maintaining regular access across the firm remains critical. It's really important that our people stay connected with our firm priorities, with client work, and with one another.

Our firm leaders and all of our partners, therefore, have made a point of reaching out to our people often both for business and personal reasons. The entire workplace has been effectively split up with different people given responsibility for reach outs. That's in addition to the normal organic reach outs that we have. And our office heads, several of whom are newly appointed, have been fantastic.

Communication can get kind of boring, right, especially when you're not in person, and so we constantly look for new ways to communicate. Every year, our talented partners put on an amazing musical show at our partner offsites. Almost from day one of our office shutdown, I began sharing music videos that inspired me, and I challenged others to do the same, and it did not take long for others to follow me.

We've also distributed Zoom video meeting tips to help our folks look their best on camera using O'Melveny-branded backgrounds. But this technology took on a whole new purpose as our so-called O'Melveny videoconference chorus gathered for a remote rendition of "Save the Last Dance for Me," which they called "Keep Your Pants On For Me."