After 35 years trotting around the world in an international disputes practice, it is strange to be trying to do everything remotely. I have now spent about a month operating from my adult son's boyhood bedroom. Of course, many people, predominantly women—because of centuries of sexist roles—have managed significant careers working from home while also raising kids, managing households, walking dogs, and doing myriad other tasks. So, to clarify, I did not want to suggest that it was difficult or unusual to work from home, just that it was very different from what I had been doing for my career. Having hopefully redeemed myself from any suggestion of "Mansplaining," I wanted to share some thoughts about how things are going now that lockdown has hit the one-month point with at least another month, likely more, to go.

First, nothing focuses the mind on effective management of a law firm like being forced from your premises, finding that many of your clients are operating either remotely or under absolute shutdowns, or, unfortunately, in the hospital. New projects are delayed; deadlines are off the table; courts are shut down; and everyone wants to husband their resources to the greatest extent possible. So the first thing to do is identify what essential work must be done, can be done and what clients think should be done.

In a small litigation firm, management of the work of the firm comes from the quotidian interactions between associates, partners and clients. As senior partner, I have always wanted to assure that the firm is big enough to handle most every case, but small enough that I really know all my colleagues, talk to them reasonably regularly, and have a rough idea of what the caseload of the firm is and where most of the cases are in the litigation process. Usually, I can accomplish this without special effort; it just happens—in the halls, getting coffee, at lunch, when someone stops by to talk through an issue, sitting together at a ballgame.

Now, there are no hallway chats, no Keurigs, no ballgames, no group lunches, no one stopping by. In this environment, the risks of not knowing who is working on what; what is being billed; and what is being collected are too great. So, we have put in place procedures we have never had before. Every timekeeper must submit her time at the end of every day. In this way, we can tell in near-real time who is busy and who is not and make sure that we are balancing assignments and workloads. We also have advance notice if things are slowing down.

We also use our weekly work group video chats to talk about cases. We have six work groups with overlapping membership. Most litigators operate to deadline. The work group discussions allow us to think about our cases in a more holistic way and do necessary assignments now that don't have an imminent filing date but are necessary and would otherwise have been done in a panic late at night. All those important projects that keep falling to the bottom of the in-tray because a court isn't demanding something sooner, can now be done with forethought. Once a week, we move the usual work group meeting time to the end of the day and it is accompanied by beverages of choice.

Finally, by monitoring work-flow better, we can also watch our receivables and work in process in real time to make sure that lawyers are paying attention to the finances of the firm, getting their bills out promptly and monitoring collections. No one is too busy in trial or taking dozens of depositions to send out a bill. Managing cash flow is the key to emerging whole on the other side.

I think this experience has made us better managers; of course, the secret of law firms is that lawyers are generally good at being lawyers, but lousy at being managers. I also think in a strange way, operating this way has brought the firm closer together. The folks in the New York or Washington offices normally see their same-city colleagues every day, but their colleagues in the other office less often. Now we all see each other nearly every day, albeit by Zoom. We see and chat about our homes in the backgrounds (unless we put up our college football stadiums or the Great Wall of China as a background); we see each other's kids and dogs.

We have always done a lot of human rights work and continue to do so. We have clients in Guantanamo Bay and on death row. We are very conscious that many of the people we serve, and many in our community, don't have the luxury of social distancing or physical safety or health care or Zoom. We think about them and try to push their cases forward to the extent we can. We lawyers will be fine.

Eric Lewis is senior partner at Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss.