McDermott's Ira Coleman on Guiding a Health Care Firm Through a Health Care Crisis

Ira Coleman: We were planning for some kind of recession, whether it was going to be in 2020 or beyond. We were set up for an amazing year in 2020, we had all this wind in our sails, and we were having our best first quarter ever after having our best year ever, so we were feeling good. And then the world changed on that Wednesday night [March 11], and all of a sudden it wasn't just our Japan operations affected or our friends in China. This is a real global pandemic and this is going to change the way we do business for now and probably for the foreseeable future.

The beauty is this is something that really energized our leadership team. It's a challenge, but we rise to the occasion. We felt really good that we had been preparing for different recession-type scenarios and did things like hire up in our restructuring areas and in certain facets of litigation. And we're a health care firm. When you have these kind of cataclysmic events, you go back to the core of what's important to your firm. And we put clients first, put people first and home in on that.

We immediately saw that this was a situation where we're going to have to put people over profits. That's clear. We have to start seeing around corners for our clients. Not only do we have to be good lawyers and understand the law, we have to be even better crisis managers, and call up and talk to and have an empathetic outreach to all our clients to figure out what they're going through together.

We have our lawyers working around the clock to come up with great thought leadership, so as the chair of the firm to see this amazing, excellent, innovative response go out there, it's pretty cool. And I would say last but certainly not least, we geared up and made heavy investments in technology, so we can redeploy 100% of the McDermott workforce remotely like that. That's including secretaries and legal assistants, billing people, everything. We made recent investments, moving to Zoom technology, moving to better, stronger, more powerful laptops, getting them in more people's hands, just going through the things that allow you to work remotely. Those things allow us to immediately host 2,500-person meetings for clients and the firm, to be able to do an entire partner meeting through Zoom, to take what we built but move it to a virtual platform and be able to service and visit with clients remotely.

When a client's in crisis, we'd normally get on a plane with our best people, go visit them and hug them, say we're going to get through this together. Now we have to do it by Zoom, but we're still doing it, and it's still so meaningful. To be able to continue to practice with the love and compassion that McDermott has for our clients and our people and our communities is huge, and that's unwavering. That hasn't changed through this crisis. If anything we've seen it ramp up.

BS: What sticking points have you come across in this process?

IC: Our lawyers know how to work this way. Their teams have been working this way. Our staff professionals have not. So we're being inclusive and doing things like recommending to our teams to start the day off with a Zoom videoconference with all their people on it. Keeping the fabric of the firm through that connection is really important. We're reminding people that they have to have family time and have mental health breaks. When you're in crisis mode working 24/7 and every day is the same, there's no weekend thought process, you've got to remind people to take breaks. If you're in an area where you can go for a walk with the kids, do that. Back off from your commitment to McDermott and clients for some time, and stay healthy.

BS: Do you have any sense that coming out of this, your firm and others may be in a better position in terms of culture and collegiality?

IC: We absolutely will be in a better position. We will be much more nimble. We will try not to use offices as status symbols anymore, because nobody can say they need it because we just worked for a month or three months without it. A lot of things are going to change in the physical way we do work. I think emotionally, the connection of going through something like this, going through the gauntlet with clients, there's an incredibly strong bond there. It's an opportunity to show that nimbleness is an amazing skill, and getting out needed information to clients when they want it is better than having a white-shoe name attached to your firm. I can't tell you how many private equity firms are telling us, "Your COVID material is so much better than we're getting from other shops." Those guys are really smart, and they're doing great things, but we're steeped in health care, we live it. So our resources are that much better, our core that much more connected, our clients are that much more in it and innovative. We feel this isn't just about money to them, it's about saving lives. It's easy to get motivated by that.

BS: What have clients been asking for in the past month as they look to secure their businesses?

IC: Everything from the CARES Act and how it affects them to what money's available and what they can do to preserve these businesses going forward, protect their workforce, but still be in a position to be a strong and healthy business coming out the other side. We're spending a lot of time working with them, negotiating with landlords, negotiating with lenders, coming up with employment plans, working through handling if folks test positive and how to deal with that. Or when people have to terminate or furlough people, the issues around that.

BS: Do you anticipate changes in the longer term to McDermott's health care practice?

IC: These are the kind of things that make you rise to the challenge. There will be new issues and new aggregation points, whether it's more M&A activity or more designed around getting us more prepared as a world and as a country in the future. Can I see cabinet-level positions like we had after 9/11? Can I see a "Department of Pandemics"? Absolutely. Will McDermott be on the forefront of helping people work through that? Of course.

And then on the life science side, all the folks who do testing and vaccines and the like, we'll be deeply involved in that. And then if you pull back to the folks who finance this, the capitalists and the private equity firms who are investing will be a big part of it.

As great as our health system was and is, we've poked a lot of holes and seen where there are a lot of deficiencies, especially on surge capacity, especially on testing, so there's a ways to go. And we're talking about putting billions into this. Not to be crass, but I think it'll be very helpful for McDermott and our economics in the future. But much more importantly, I think we'll be able to help solve a lot of problems in the world, and we're proud of that.

BS: How has the crisis changed plans that the firm had for 2020?

IC: If everybody's back at work at the end of May and everybody's off to the races, great. But we don't see that. We're being very conservative about planning any gatherings. We think that's just good practice. We're also being very conservative about any spends that are not directly client-related. We don't want to tamp down on innovation, because there's amazing innovation occurring on our current platform.

BS: Who do you view as your chief competition, including any type of service provider? Do you anticipate any shift in the landscape coming out of this?

IC: We look at our competition as everybody up the food chain on the Am Law 50 and everybody lower than us as well, because we know great people can come from both places and great ideas can come from all around. And then you have the entire professional consultancy world out there—the accounting firms, alternative law firm providers and the like. You've just got to be really close to your clients now.

We have three things that we look at: Are we becoming more indispensable to clients? Does this decision make us more productive, more profitable? And is it going to make us a happier, more fun place? That's the goofy one, but it's really important. I wouldn't be so brash as to say we can steal market share, but I will say based on the Zoom conferences that I've been on and the thought leadership that we've been putting out, we're blowing away our competition, or at least our clients are perceiving it as such.

BS: What have you been focusing on as you lead the firm through a difficult time?

IC: It's all about communication and setting the tone. There are many leaders at a law firm, but as the chair of the law firm my duty is to listen, and that's what I'm doing more of. We have a coronavirus task force that meets in a Zoom meeting every morning with my C-suite and some other members on the team, and we go around and listen to what everybody's saying is happening. I'm calling up partners and asking them what they're hearing from clients.

There's two funny things about crisis: They always happen, and eventually they're over. So keep your eye on the ball. What's really important is we make sure we send the message that we're very fiscally fit, we have no debt, we can get through this very well, it doesn't mean that we're not going to do anything as a firm, of course we will, but we will get through this and we'll come out better on the other side. We will message that it's people over profits and adhere to our core values—going above and beyond for clients, and above and beyond for this firm.

We had our last partners meeting in October in Orlando [Florida]. I used it as a call to action that we're going to have bad times ahead. I was thinking more economics than pandemic, but you don't always get your choice. And what I said is good firms get through crisis, great firms lead in crisis and do things to get better on the other end. So our unofficial motto is "Always Better." This is an easy time to have the "Always Better" mentality. It's a hard time to execute on it, and that's what we're asking.

BS: What keeps you up at night right now?

IC: We have a little French bulldog who now is quarantined with us, my daughter's dog, who has become my emotional support animal. We're happy to be quarantined with her, but she snores. So she's pretty much the only thing keeping me up at night. I know I need to sleep well and keep my strength up to get us through these times, and I'm doing everything in my power to do it. It doesn't do me any good to go down the rabbit holes of looking at articles in the middle of the night. Occasionally I do it, but I'd rather not do it during rest time.

I'm energized by this. Running a law firm is never easy, but now you feel there is an imperative to do it right. And it's more than making money, it's really doing the right thing for your clients and your communities.