Henry M. Greenberg. (Photo: David Handschuh/ALM)

While many law firms may be positioned to weather the coronavirus's impact on the economy, some small firms and solo practitioners are scrambling—and the New York State Bar Association is trying to help.

The group is creating an emergency task force to connect small firms and solos with economic aid, help them transition to working from home and advocate for them with state and federal policymakers. More than half of the group's members are solos or work at firms with 10 or fewer lawyers.

"COVID-19 is having a devastating impact on solo and small firm practitioners, many of whom have limited financial resources to draw upon during the crisis," said Greenberg Traurig's Hank Greenberg, the group's president, in a statement. "The task force will focus like a laser beam on these lawyers' immediate needs, in addition to helping them meet the challenges the profession will face when the crisis subsides."

June Castellano, a solo family law practitioner in Rochester, and Domenick Napoletano, a solo commercial litigator in Brooklyn, are leading the group. They said Wednesday that they were still finalizing its membership but plan to act quickly and offer action items to the NYSBA and the New York State Bar Foundation on a rolling basis.

Attorneys at small firms and solo practitioners have said in recent interviews that they lack the capital cushion of some larger firms and are worried about their finances. Echoing points made by some other lawyers, one solo real estate practitioner in New York who declined to be named said both the landlord-tenant litigation side of his practice and the transactional side were at a standstill.

"L&T is frozen. For transactional, I don't know if the deal is gonna go through," said the lawyer. "I always get paid at the close, [because] that's when the guy has all the money."

One possible resource attorneys will be able to use are loans backed by the Small Business Administration, Napoletano said. The $2 trillion stimulus bill passed by Congress on Wednesday would vastly expand the SBA's war chest, according to news reports. And while the Bar Foundation's resources pale in comparison to those of the government, it may also be able to help solos and small firms, said Castellano, who is on the foundation's board.

"We have begun, as a foundation board, to examine what it is we can and cannot do," she said. "We are pretty much exploring everything. We don't have any set plans yet—we are literally in the process of developing what we will be able to do."

While some solos and small firms make frequent use of new technologies or work from a home office, the mass switch-over from an office setting to remote working has been a steep learning curve for others. Castellano said that she has learned how to use Zoom, how to merge calls, and how to coordinate drafting and editing of documents with her remote paralegal with Office365.

"I'm expecting that we are all going to come through this on the other side" with skills that will benefit our practices in the long term, she said.