The COVID-19 pandemic is already making its impact felt on the legal tech market. On Friday, a 30-day travel ban preventing foreign visitors out of Europe from entering the U.S. officially went into effect, which means that legal tech companies could find themselves pushing their own internal use of remote collaboration tools or communications platforms to the next level.

Chris DeConti, head of strategy at legal managed services business Factor, said that as of Monday all company employees were told to begin working at home, a total that amounts to about 500 people spread across locations like Belfast, Northern Ireland; London; and Wroclaw, Poland. It was one step on a broader business continuity plan that Factor has been ramping up over the last few weeks as the impact of the coronavirus continued to grow.

"We had to attend to some basics like making sure that everyone had a functioning laptop and just a little bit of housekeeping, but we had this business continuity plan in place and this is probably the most thorough test of it or real life application of it," DeConti said.

But not every legal tech company is ready to ask their employees to start working from home yet. Liam Brown, chairman and CEO of Elevate, said the company's immediate response to the European travel plan was to make sure that any foreign nationals that needed to return to the United States did so. Brown indicated he's attempting to take a "measured" response to the pandemic—if people need to work from home to care for themselves or a loved one, they can.

As for the day-to-day operations of the company itself, it doesn't sound as if the travel ban will impose much disruption. Elevate has a distributed headquarters that isn't concentrated in any one geographic location, and the company also maintains service centers and hubs around the world, including Europe. How the virus will ultimately impact the ability of that workforce to continue servicing clients is difficult to predict. 

"Do I think there will be customer impact? I think there will be some but I think it will be marginal. It'll really be more about individuals having to care for their families because schools or closed or look after their elder parents that they are worried about," Brown said.

Meena Heath, chief marketing officer of the legal services provider QuisLex, shared similar concerns about how employee health would impact the infrastructure of different companies around the globe. Still, the travel ban itself should not pose any significant threats to the way QuisLex conducts business. While company representatives will occasionally meet with clients face-to-face in an effort to build relationships, the majority of their interactions are conducted over various communications platforms.

"At the moment what I'm seeing in the legal market generally is it's perhaps less the legal tech side and more the actual [law] firms where they've got people going into offices where they've got the switch to make," Heath said.

But that doesn't mean that all companies have escaped unscathed by the travel ban. AbacusNext recently opened a new office in London and was planning to send a representative from the company's San Diego office to help get the operation on its feet. Those plans, along with a scheduled product summit to meet and greet various employees and partners stationed around the globe, have been cancelled.

"We now are creating a series of meetings all online using Microsoft Teams software, using Google meeting software. … We'll record each of them, we're creating transcripts of them and then making sure that's part of the information that we share," said Tomas Suros, global product marketing director of legal at AbacusNext.

Of course, it's worth noting that the travel ban doesn't just impact legal tech companies, but how clients engage with their products. Jake Heller, CEO of Casetext, said that clients living in fear of an overall economic downturn have already begun reorienting their conversations with the business around various automated solutions that can help defray costs.

For legal tech vendors this could equate to some new opportunities and even newer customers. Heller mentioned that Fortune 500 companies in particular were looking for places to trim expenses—including legal. "We've especially worked with a lot of large law firms in the past, but I think that the more interesting group for us right now is the in-house corporate counsel," he said.

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