Some years ago, my office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel had a clinical relationship with Yale Law School where we teamed up our lawyers with a professor and some law students who investigated, researched, negotiated and either settled or prosecuted some of our cases. During a meeting between a respondent attorney and a lawyer from my office at Yale, the respondent had a heart attack. Quite shaken, the lawyer from my office called me. I could hear the EMTs in the background doing CPR. "What should I do?" he asked. "Well, Frank", I replied, "this is what we in education call a teachable moment." He went back and had a discussion with the students about the stresses of law practice, the need for balance, and not blaming themselves for a problem they hadn't created.

I was thinking of this "teachable moment" pedagogy as my colleagues and I at UConn reformed our teaching modality in a matter of two weeks to accommodate the Coronavirus crisis. Jessica Rubin, director of the Legal Practice Department, quickly and brilliantly modified our syllabus to allow the students to finish their semester using e-platforms. A few weeks after we began, courts began to follow suit.

The first challenge was reforming lecture classes onto electronic meeting platforms. Distance learning, which had been used by some of my colleagues to teach with a sister program in Korea but was far from the norm for most classes, is now the new normal. It will remain so for many years to come as social distancing will restrict the number of students who can meet in a single room. Once we get into the 2.0 and 3.0 versions of the new virtual classrooms and learn how to do something other than the talking head/PowerPoint slide thing, it's going to be a wonderful tool—though if you can watch Irving Younger online, why ever watch me?

Student/teacher interaction, one-on-one counselling, and individualized feedback is now done electronically. That's also how I met with two of my doctors last week to debrief my COVID odyssey. Office visits are going to be more the exception than the rule in many areas, including law. I've been remoting from home for years, and none of my clients have complained. Get used to it—It works, and the ease, cost savings and convenience are going to drive the reality that many of us are never going back to cubicles. Think of the savings on office rent!

Doing this is one thing. Doing it well—developing trust and rapport, and managing a productive relationship through a computer platform—is going to take some effort. My guess is the next generation of law grads will be ready and well-equipped to work in your virtual firms.

One challenge we had involved teams of students arguing cross summary judgment motions before several judges. All of that got moved into Web-x "rooms," about the same time SCOTUS tried phone arguments, and courts around the country began experimenting with the same thing. The first iterations had no shortage of glitches, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Do you stand when a judge enters the virtual courtroom? If you do, the screen shows a bunch of belt buckles. And folks forget that while they are waiting to argue, they're still "in the courtroom" and visible to all. No time to be putting on makeup, checking e-mails or Facebook or eating donuts.

Issues of lighting, avoiding the reflection of computer screens in eyeglasses and the chaos that happens when two speakers try to have a spirited back-and-forth, such as litigants responding to a hot bench, all challenged my young gladiators. A colleague and I recorded an argument and asked the students to critique it. I was embarrassed to see that my hands, which I tend to wave about some during arguments, look like a pair of demented pigeons flying in and out of screen view. I'm going to buy a pair of handcuffs.

These foibles haven't all be limited to my law classes. During a grievance hearing I tried a few weeks ago, where we had witnesses and parties from three states on a large screen in the courtroom, one of the grievance committee members asked what background noise she was hearing. One of the litigants was unmuted and playing video games on her laptop while she waited to testify. Some red faces with that one.

As we finished our arguments and lingered in the virtual courtrooms to debrief, I wished my students well and assured them that the things they were learning were not theoretical, but instead were the leading edge of how clients, lawyers and courts are going to be working together for the rest of their careers. Whether that's good or bad is not my call. All I know is we'll save a lot on pants and socks.

Mark Dubois, Connecticut's first chief disciplinary counsel, is with Geraghty & Bonnano in New London and teaches at at the University of Connecticut School of Law. He can be reached at [email protected].