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A rapid shift to remote work. Snap decisions on the fate of carefully planned summer associate programs. And, in many cases, compensation cuts for lawyers and staff, along with furloughs and layoffs.

Law firms of all shapes and sizes have been forced to pivot quickly in responding to the coronavirus crisis, a disruption that many leaders and industry observers say dramatically outstrips the Great Recession in scope and impact.

Not that firm leaders have had much choice in the matter. State and local shutdown orders mandated the move away from the office, and the nearly instantaneous rupture to many clients' businesses forced their hands on financial matters.

"The clients themselves were feeling so much pain—from a law firm perspective, when you see clients themselves slicing the prices they're willing to pay by 10, 15, 20%, it doesn't take a mathematical genius to tell that you need to make a change," says Michael Kim, the founder of litigation boutique Kobre & Kim.

Nonetheless, in some quarters there's optimism about a future in which firm leaders recognize that they can make decisions with substantial consequences with more alacrity than in the past. Just as firms have used lessons from 2008 to guide them over the last three months, COVID-19 could serve as another inflection point toward nimble leadership.

For Adam Smith Esq. partner Janet Stanton, the Great Recession offered empirical evidence demonstrating the favorability of centralized management.

"The firms that made those kinds of changes came out much stronger than firms that did not," she says.

Leaders of both smaller firms, like Kim, who notes the rise of litigation boutiques like his own since the last financial crisis, and larger firms, like Hogan Lovells CEO Steve Immelt, believe it's unfair to pigeonhole the legal industry as a collection of lumbering dinosaurs unable to prepare for a changing future.

"If you really think back at the changes in the law firm sector in the past 20 years, there have been a lot of changes and a lot of adaptation," Immelt says.

Nonetheless, one fundamental point remains unaltered. Law firms are still partnerships. And these partners expect to have a say. Furthermore, their expectations are backed up by the fine print—partnership agreements that methodically enumerate the types of decisions that partners have to agree on.

"We're big believers in making decisions quickly with the best evidence you have and then moving on," says Altman Weil consultant Tom Clay. "A law firm has to cover every possible thing that could happen based on a decision; it's like the practice of law. You have to look at every possible thing that could happen. That slows you down."

Stanton agrees. "The whole notion of relitigating decisions that are already dead—we know that happens a lot in law firms," she says. "It's really going to need a headset change."

Clay is skeptical about partners ever ceding substantial authority to professional managers or the managing partner elected from their ranks, even when confronted with evidence showing the value of agile decision-making from empowered leadership, as in recent months. Altman Weil's 2019 Law Firms in Transition survey found that 69% of firms were stymied in efforts to change how they deliver legal services because "partners resist most change efforts."

"Tell me why they'd have an epiphany all of a sudden," he wonders.

But Clay does acknowledge that the largest firms in the marketplace have already begun to operate differently. "The big, rich firms—they're not nearly the democracy that a lot of firms are, by virtue of gross size," he says.

At 2,600-attorney Hogan Lovells, with over $2 billion in revenue, Immelt credits a disciplined, professionalized approach to decision-making for smoothing the transition to the new normal.

"You can make a poor decision quickly, but I think it really is a matter of thinking about yourself as a business that has to respond to the business situations that you're confronting," he says. As firms grow in size and vault across the $1 billion threshold, "that just brings with it a level of complexity that means you need to have a certain skill set."

In practice, that means having a management structure with a sharp chief financial officer and a highly professionalized human resources department, where the team can devote the proper amount of time and energy to understand an issue before taking its judgment to the partners. With these mechanisms in place, partners are persuadable.

"Lawyers are very evidence driven. Having a sophisticated CFO allows you to put together the analysis and put together the strategy in a form that the partners can understand," Immelt explains. "There's a deep appreciation of what your business services people bring to the table, and a crisis like this makes that even more manifest."

Even if the obstacles to transformation might be steeper, there's no rule that smaller firms can't embrace similar principles. Angela Sebastian-Hickey is CEO of midsize Chicago firm Levenfeld Pearlstein and oversees a management team stocked with experts who, like her, have credentials other than law degrees.

"We have a model that is built on streamlined decision-making that's helped us get to the heart of the issue, make a quick decision and communicate with transparency," she says. "That's how we've been managing through this."

Sebastian-Hickey also is convinced that the "consensus-driven approach" embraced by lawyers can be a hindrance, and that the economic theory of comparative advantage suggests that relying on lawyers to make strategic business decisions is a poor use of their time, which is finite.

"What's the highest and best use of lawyers: to manage the firm or to be in contact with clients? If you're spending time at the table, deciding to do what for the firm, you don't have the time to be advising clients," she posits. "That's not a good business model."

But even in firms where partners may resist relinquishing their hard-earned voice, leaders should still act to take advantage of the moment. There are still gains to be made via strategic thinking, whether or not the trend line of the last two decades points toward increasingly nimble decision-making.

"One of the things you need to do as a leader now is don't come out of this with a sigh of relief and go into stasis," Clay advises. "You need to be planning now to come out of this and beat the competitors."

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