This article is written by Suman Chatterjee, Team LawSikho.

Today’s article is specifically for those readers who are intimately connected with the legal profession—whether as an advocate, a law student or an in-house counsel. 

It comes directly from the desk of LawSikho’s Co-founder and COO, Abhyuday Agarwal. He interacts with multiple students and professionals every day, and he wanted to put forward his take on how the Coronavirus might end up affecting the legal profession.

The losses from coronavirus to the economy is stupendous, and will probably run into trillions of dollars across the world. In India alone, it will cost us billions of dollars and might slow down the economy tremendously. 

However, it is also going to fundamentally change everything and bring lots of new opportunities. As Littlefinger said in Game of Thrones, chaos is a ladder. 

Those who manage to climb this ladder climb very high. As the economy is being reshaped by new forces, and physical restrictions, a lot of new opportunities that were unthinkable before are opening up. 

This is a world that will favour the young, technologically savvy, flexible, ready to adapt lawyers. How? We are going to tell you here. 

This is probably the crisis of your lifetime. This is also the opportunity of your lifetime. Do not miss it. Grab it with both hands.

(In most of our articles, I try to stay positive and focus on the good news around us. However, this email has to be a little different. I hope you understand.)

Yes, China recently closed down its last coronavirus hospital. New cases are so low that they can be managed by the established hospitals.

Yes, a 103-year-young grandma has conquered COVID-19 after being treated for six days at Wuhan, China.

Yes, talks of a coronavirus vaccine being launched is in the air. 

Yes, Wuhan has reported ZERO new cases for the first day after months.

Nonetheless, the situation is deadly. In a single day, more than 3,000 died in Italy, for example, with death toll expected to increase.

In many countries, complete lockdown had to be enforced, with people allowed to step out of home only to buy groceries and medicines, and every other shops, establishments and offices being completely shut down.

India may have to do this soon as well, given the inordinate risk involved. In LawSikho, we told everyone last week to stock up on essentials to last a month, just in case, although we expect online services and delivery logistics to work just fine even in case of a lockdown.

There you go. Businesses are shifting from offline to online in a big way. People are being forced to adapt to online platforms to do business, whether they like or not. Work from home has become the norm, and is likely to remain that way for a few months. 

In China, when SARS broke out in 2002, such a lockdown had to be kept in place for 6 months!

The world, businesses, your workplaces, and even your career has to adapt to these new challenges and new circumstances.

Will you be able to identify opportunities and capitalize, or will you get devastated by these sudden, cataclysmic changes?

Or will you just manage to endure this situation?

We are gradually seeing a shift to work-from-home arrangements from almost all the major law firms. They have shifted to using various tools for project management and video. 

How will it affect your legal practice, whether in the court or inside the boardroom? 

How will it impact your job or promotion opportunities?

How will we, the legal community, survive in the Coronavirus regime?   

Abhyuday believes that there will be drastic changes with the COVID-19 outbreak…some changes which will be permanent. 

Take the example of the Supreme Court suddenly being open to virtual courts and recording witness testimony and allowing arguments through video conferencing, for instance.

Imagine how this will impact the companies which have been working on software for online mediation or arbitration. They are going to benefit a lot from this massive shift due to C-19.

Wait! Why not hear the rest from Abhyuday only?

Over to Abhyuday…

***

COVID-19 Outbreak:
Drastic changes to be prepared for

Hi, I am Abhyuday, and let’s get to the point.

The situation is serious, believe it or not.

It’s my job to regularly keep a finger on the pulse of the legal industry. 

And perhaps, I am the best person to tell you how this COVID-19 outbreak is actually affecting the industry and the professionals within it, because I talk to professionals and service providers of all sorts as a part of my work, and from every practice area you can imagine. 

How come? It is because we either have already built a course on a certain practice area, or I am currently building one, or at least talking to experts about what to build. 

I also get to learn from our 2,000+ currently enrolled students, as well as thousands of alumni. 

The number of our active teachers in 40+ courses that we offer is over 60 and growing. 

And as the COO of LawSikho, I have to keep in touch with all of them.

And I think, in the next 3 months, the legal system is going to become flatter than ever. 

What do I mean by that? And what are my reasons?

Let’s go through them one by one.

Client development goes online

Relationship building will gradually move online as social distancing becomes the norm. 

Local presence will not offer an appreciable advantage. 

All meetings must happen virtually. 

Hence, a lawyer from a smaller city or town would have as much chance to build a relationship with a Mumbai or Delhi-based client as a lawyer with a local presence. Local presence will begin to matter less and less for a whole set of matters, starting with this outbreak. 

This may last post the outbreak also. Lawyers from smaller cities who acquire clients in the metros and earn their trust by providing high-quality services in this period are likely to retain them even when social distancing requirements cease. 

Remember that lawyers from smaller cities have a significant cost advantage, although many of them simply do not have the knowledge or skills or even the foresight or the gumption to approach clients in other cities.

Even after social distancing requirements cease, clients are likely to be far more open to virtual meetings in comparison to physical ones in the future because what we are seeing now is a change in habit, change in mindset, and a change in comfort level when it comes to virtual meetings.

Once you realise how well virtual meetings are, you do not want to go back to physical meetings. 

Lawyers in smaller cities and towns may enjoy a further competitive advantage. As living and other costs in smaller cities are lower, you will be able to offer high-value services at lower costs and yet operate profitably. 

Clients are price-sensitive, they will work harder to do business, but will want more value for their money. 

This also means you will also not need to spend on fancy offices, marquee addresses, luxury cars or office boys to convince clients that you are an elite lawyer. Clients will appreciate your prices through how well you educate them, how you address their specific needs, the quality of your services and the recommendations they receive about you.

Your online profiles, recommendations, following, content posted by you and overall online credibility you build will matter more than ever.

Suddenly, online business development, an anathema for many lawyers, would be the only way to do business development when you are forced to stay at home.

Hiring will be lesser in numbers, tougher too

Lawyers will not hire untrained juniors. The minimum standard of training for a junior will gradually increase. 

It is one thing to think that you can train someone in your office if they are in front of you, but to train them when they are working from home is even harder.

Lawyers and firms will want juniors who already have a high level of prior training in the area of work they perform. They may also administer some customized training programs to upskill the juniors who have been hired. 

Those who apply for job openings will have to research a lot more and personalize their CVs to better cater to the organization’s requirements. 

Training in a virtual environment is very different from in-person training. In an in-person training environment, learning can be chaotic. Freshers can burn the midnight oil and learn in an unstructured manner, through multiple unplanned interactions. 

That does not work in a virtual environment. 

Preparing the whole virtual setup for the training of the juniors might not be that easy. External assistance in the administration of structured training programs might be required. 

We are very sure that this is going to be the case because we are already getting feelers from some clients asking for such solutions.

Internships trickier to get

Lawyers will be willing to accept online interns but will be very picky about who they select. 

Identifying someone’s strengths and weaknesses online can be trickier than it sounds.

They will need a mechanism to screen and identify trained interns (perhaps in the form of industry-recognized certification). They will not want to spend a lot of time guiding interns unless someone shows a lot of promise and long-term commitment. 

Interns need to understand that these are desperate times, and desperate measures will be applied if required. So, if you, as a prospective intern, want to bag that opportunity of your dreams, you need to equip yourself with legal knowledge and expertise that puts you ahead of your peers and train you adequately to work in such environments, where you can’t even count on being present in the office.

Knowledge management turns into full-blown training, L&D on steroids!

Knowledge management initiatives are quite primitive in several law firms. Technology is poor—usually, there is a tool such as Google Drive, a local intranet or SharePoint. 

A lot of knowledge management work largely involves sharing of updates, which someone from a different team will not be able to understand in depth. One also finds difficulty in understanding how client opinions will change. 

These efforts will be upgraded to full-scale training initiatives, probably with help from external sources, outside the mainstream legal industry. 

Training for freshers to intensify more

Training for freshers is often quite chaotic—training programs by top corporate law firms do not help juniors from failing to deliver, and even dropping out or getting fired from their jobs. 

Attrition is atrocious in big law firms in the 0-2 PQE level for this reason. 

What is the strategy of law firms to train junior lawyers? Some weekly knowledge sharing sessions, numerous ‘chaotic’ interactions in an office environment and working long hours fills in for this gap, almost serendipitously. 

However, when remote working is the norm, one cannot get direct ‘exposure’ to a lawyer’s office anymore and cannot rely on such chaotic serendipity—you will need to be trained beforehand to be able to get selected and law firms will still need more well-planned training programs to rapidly upgrade their junior lawyers, with help of experts.

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They will also require more sophisticated technology to manage knowledge. Intranet and cloud-based repositories like Google Drive will not suffice.

Salaries about to go up, up and away

Some of the people who are working from home in our teams have consistently been able to put in more hours at work than those who go to the office. I personally have been able to clock in a lot more productive time at work when I work from my home.

We have also created a co-living facility in a guest house where some of our team members in Delhi live together and now work from. This is able to create a mini Lawsikho hub where people can work smoothly from and collaborate easily. 

What I am trying to say here is that the higher your productivity is, the higher your paycheck will probably become. Also, those people who are disciplined enough to do well working from home, are most likely to get ahead in their career!

Now the nature of legal work that you can do might change a bit since you can’t go out of home and meet people, including your clients, lawyers and juniors. 

However, if you structure your work properly, you might end up finding a smarter way to do your work.

What young lawyers can do during these times

Upgrade your legal skills

Travelling to your office or your college, being present there all day and again travelling back, all exhausted and drained… come to think about it, you have a lot of free hours in your hand now. Join an online course, attend online classes, finish assignments and plan for your future. 

This is a great opportunity to get ahead of the curve, and step out of the line and learn more than your peers know. Such opportunities are hard to come by!

I am doing the same thing.

Build your professional network 

Add people on LinkedIn, interact with your peers and share more content online. This will take time to gain traction, but you will reap rich dividends if you just start doing this.

Our students take about 3 months to get the hang of it, and we have to push them quite a bit to make them start sharing content on social media. We are still working out better models to encourage them to become more active on social media because it is simply so amazingly rewarding.  

In these 3 months, try to be as active as possible and not be “out of mind” of your clients, peers and bosses, especially when you are “out of sight” for so long. 

Ask about the challenges faced by your audience, provide them with useful and actionable solutions, and try to be more participative. It will stand you in good stead later on.

Create innovative content

Share free information, checklists, legal health check-ups and free training. When you are not being able to go out and meet someone physically in person, the best way to be on the radar of that person is to share valuable content with him or her. Indirect marketing at its best!

Try to make your content visually appealing, something that catches the eye of your audience while he is scrolling through the Facebook feeds or WhatsApp messages. How? If you are a tech-savvy person, you can use Photoshop or if you are like me, you can go for Canva as well.

One good idea is to offer contract drafting and startups advisory services, whether for a fee or not. For any small business, these are highly in-demand skills that might increase your chances of getting hired later on. 

Send video recordings while applying

Telephonic interviews and physical interviews will also move online, to video conferencing, as much as possible. 

In fact, we suggest that you create a 2-min video-based application/CV using the free Zoom app and send it along with your documentary CV wherever you apply for jobs. 

It will enable prospective recruiters to understand you much better and it will get more attention. After all, 93 per cent of all communication is non-verbal. 

Just remember to make “sense” in the video. And it can only happen when you have an idea of what the recruiter might be really looking for.

Yes, times are changing, thanks to Coronavirus. Things might get harder (or easier) depending on how you tackle it.

If you need any help from me personally, you can always get in touch with me by either calling 011 4084 5203 or commenting below.

That’s about it from me.

***

Okay, it’s me, Suman, again.

Well, not much left to talk about.

Abhyuday definitely raised a few good points which we cannot ignore.

One thing though, change is immortal. Not only because of Coronavirus but in general. 

So, if you want to survive and thrive in the legal industry, you have to gradually evolve to become the best you can be.

Let’s this be the start to your good times ahead. Those who prepare hard in the lean times, always become the champion in the good times.

See you tomorrow.

P. S. Till 31st March 2020, you can enrol in your favourite course at its current pricing. From 1st April, the fees of all LawSikho courses are due to increase by 20-50% without further delay. Do note that we have enrolment for ALL courses available on our portal for the next few days, so that anyone who wants to enrol at the current pricing may do so. Enrol in a course right now >>>

P. P. S. Confused about where your career is heading? Want to talk to a career counselling expert who can answer your questions and guide you to take your career to the next level? Give us a call at +91 11 4084 5203 and we will get back to you ASAP.

P. P. P. S. All our premium courses are covered by a 30-days full money-back guarantee. Don’t hesitate and try our courses 100% risk-free!

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