Learning to navigate the pitfalls and perks of Zoom has been fun. Thankfully, being an expert in Zoom is not my job nor the job of those I interact with regularly. We lawyers all have a high tolerance for the fumbling and bumbling of meeting and presenting over this newly mandated medium as most of us suffer the same blind spots when it comes to such technology.

Those blind spots are due, in part, to the fact that law firms are inherently insular institutions. They have the privilege of holding secret their clients' most privileged secrets. COVID-19 challenged that culture by disrupting how law firms operate. Opening hundreds, maybe even thousands, of new connections between their dispersed professionals and sacred client files was not their first choice. In spite of that, I've been impressed at how firms of all sizes have managed to make this transition rather quickly. (A quick shout-out to the receptionist in an office of Morrison & Foerster that seamlessly connected me to two different colleagues working remotely without even the slightest hint of struggle in doing so at a distance.)

The shift to working from home was possible for these firms because there was a road map already in place providing guidance on how to make it happen. Indeed, even the most insular of firms had some form of framework for remote access. The requirements and vocabulary of remote access were able to be scaled because there was a standard — a road map in this analogy — that satisfied three essential criteria: It could be shared, it could then be implemented and tracked, and it could be monitored for compliance (security) and performance (productivity).