The legal industry needs three things to work: Paying clients; a functioning court system; and the ability to use our skills to solve problems. As the COVID-19 crisis crawls toward the end of the second month of shutdown, clients are in crisis and courts are triaging. Where does that leave practicing lawyers? In a good position to use our skills to solve problems even while we're practicing from our kitchen tables or basement "offices," despite the historically unprecedented systemic impediments.

The pandemic is rapidly forcing changes in lawyer behavior and lifestyle that are accelerating the transformation of our business environment into a permanent 21st century world of electronic communications, virtual offices and networked interactions. I say this as a 60-year-old litigator who learned to do legal research using hard copy volumes of case reporters and Shepherds and who still only feels truly comfortable reviewing cases and documents on paper with a pen. So I'm no apostle for tech law. I'm just a guy who likes and needs to practice law and doesn't want to sit by and wait while my clients' cases languish, my colleagues face endless economic anxiety in an industry that has already lost 64,000 jobs (see Patrick Smith, "Legal Industry Shed 64,000 Jobs in April as Layoffs and Furloughs Spread," New York Law Journal, May 8, 2020) and our profession loses its luster out of perceived lack of functionality during a global pandemic that will shape and define our business not just for months but for far longer (at least until a vaccine for this silent killer is found and implemented globally).

Let's look at what practicing lawyers actually do and ask: Is there really any reason these activities can't proceed full speed ahead during the COVID-19 interregnum?

Many of us basically write for a living. Pleadings, discovery requests and responses and briefs are our stock in trade. That is, essentially, solitary work, different in style to be sure, but not in kind, from when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth while the Globe Theater was shut during an early-17th century plague. Bill Gates and others long ago solved for the problem of how groups of lawyers could collaborate on writing documents without handing paper back and forth, even at great distance from each other. Simply put, the work of what we still sometimes anachronistically call the "paper practice" of commercial law can continue unimpeded. Indeed, even with the courts in the Northeast basically closed to nonessential civil filings, in many cases counsel are meeting briefing schedules by serving and responding to motion papers even though those papers cannot now be filed in court.

The vast majority of litigation activity, at least in a commercial practice, is consumed in discovery. There is no insurmountable impediment to carrying on normal discovery activities even amidst this "new normal" (the most abused phrase of our time).

Nearly all document discovery was nearly completely virtual activity even before the COVID crisis. I love to tell younger associates in my law firm the story of when I was dispatched to a warehouse in Minneapolis in February to physically sort and review documents to prepare them for production. (It's now my pale and privileged archaic equivalent of when my Grandma Anna used to tell me the story of the first time she saw an automobile, when a German officer drove one into her shtetl during World War I). Even on the client side of document retrieval for production, searches are conducted electronically and documents are flagged and pulled from email and document maintenance systems remotely and electronically. When from time-to-time I ask if there are any hard copy files in a witness's office that need to be reviewed, people look at me as if I'm the resurrected ghost of a New York corporate lawyer in a suit and tie sitting in a big Rockefeller Center office in the 20th century. (Well, actually, that basically described me until mid-March).

That leads us to depositions, currently the great gripe of litigators frustrated by the giant adjournment that often feels like it has descended on our professional lives. In our second month of litigating in a global pandemic, the perceived inability to proceed with depositions is a phony issue that we as a profession need to soundly reject. Online depositions entail some awkward annoyances: Internet connections drop; sound and video don't sync; online exhibits are cumbersome and intimidating to less tech savvy litigators. For lawyers with young kids at home, there are extreme challenges of space and attention. But there are some benefits to taking and defending depositions from home too: hugging loved ones during a break is wonderful; cooking your own meal during a lunch break is way better. (It felt pretty odd when I helped fold sheets during a break in a recent expert deposition.)

At the first couple of online depositions I participated in during this pandemic, I reached two clear conclusions about them. First, annoyance and oddity aside, there is no meaningful difference between a videoconference deposition and a deposition in real life; questions are asked and answered, exhibits are marked and examined, a full record is made and preserved. What more do we need? Second, a video deposition can be every bit as tedious or as contentious as an in-person deposition. In a virtual deposition, whether on Zoom, Skype or some of the more refined and tailored deposition platforms offered by some court reporting services, depositions proceed as they do in the real world, with all the usual slow-motion fascinations as the facts get teased out and all their lawyerly frustrations as we deploy all our elaborate and often stilted litigation customs.

Some of the rituals of depositions probably should be discarded online, but old habits die hard. It never really works and is inappropriate to bully or berate a witness by talking at or over her—which transcribed videoconferencing makes impossible. I've been known on rare occasions to declare a break in a deposition and storm out of the room due, of course, to my adversary's obnoxious behavior. And I'll admit that I've already hung up on a (personal) Zoom call in a fit of pique. Hopefully, it won't come to that during virtual depositions. Even so, the technology permits even for some of the worst of stupid lawyer tricks.

Two months of litigating from home is proving that virtual depositions work. They are feasible, fully functional and required now. We all need to embrace this reality and stop making excuses for why we're not proceeding with our cases. We owe it to our clients. We owe it to ourselves as self-respecting professionals desiring to be productive during this pause. It's time to get to work on our cases. No "reopening" is required to do that. Let's get on with it. What else do we have to do?

Many of the more exalted aspects of law practice are adapting and proceeding apace. The Kansas Supreme Court's extraordinary Zoom session on the Saturday before Easter reviewing the Legislature's challenge to Governor Laura Kelly's stay-at-home order showed that high-level advocacy and profoundly sophisticated judging on critical constitutional and administrative law issues can be carried out remotely from ten disparate home offices. Now that even the Supreme Court of the United States is hearing oral arguments telephonically, the technological threshold has been crossed for good. Arbitrations and mediations are proceeding virtually, as are thousands of arraignments and bail hearings every day. Bench trials are on track to proceed in some courts, often with greater use of written direct examinations and other streamlined procedures. Jury trials—and especially the profoundly democratic practices involved in jury selection and jury service—still seem like a step too far given public health mandates and technological inequalities, although one summary jury trial has proceeded virtually in Texas state court. Katie Pohlman, "Texas Court Holds first Jury Trial Via Zoom In Insurance Feud," Law360, May 18, 2020. There are potential solutions to jury selection issues worth exploring, though, through the use of jury questionnaires, video and teleconferenced voir dire and other technologically streamlined procedures. See Bill Oxley and Megan Kelly, "Selecting a jury while on lockdown," Los Angeles & San Francisco Daily Journal, April 23, 2020.

As lawyers, as a legal industry, as a nation and a world, we are facing profound uncertainty and prolonged economic pain. But an incipient economic depression does not require depression about our professional functionality. Just the opposite. We have the tools, the time and the talent to adjust our practices to this new reality—and there is a lot of good to be gained by it, not just in the near-term crisis but going forward to bring the practice of law fully and functionally into the new era that is only just beginning with this crisis.

John Siegal, a New York litigator, is a partner in BakerHostetler