Tense and remote, legal work goes on
Much is on hold, but crisis brings up new issues for lawyers to handle
Courthouses in most of California have closed their doors. Law school classrooms are empty. Jury trials are on hold. Major law firms nationwide are slashing their payrolls. But suits are still being filed and crimes are being charged. The coronavirus pandemic has damaged the business of law, like most other businesses, but it hasn’t diminished many Californians’ need for lawyers.
Like most crises, the pandemic is spawning new legal clashes — for example, between employers and workers, insurers and shuttered businesses, regulators and property owners. And on the criminal side, between those who want to keep accused wrongdoers behind bars and those who want them released. On the flip side, corporate mergers and acquisitions are down, so lawyers in those areas are seeing less work.
“My sense is that labor and employment practices, whether unionside or management, have plenty of clients in need of legal advice and representation,” said Michael Rubin, a San Francisco attorney who represents workers. “Plaintiffsside consumer lawyers don’t seem to have slowed down at all. Environmental issues are just as pressing as before.”
Victims’ rights advocates have seen little downturn.
“In a lot of respects we are busier than we’ve ever been,” said Micha Star Liberty, whose small Oakland firm represents individuals suing schools, hospitals, doctors and other professionals for physical or
sexual abuse. She is also the president of the 4,000member Consumer Attorneys of California.
Other subsets of legal practice are also flourishing.
“Tech, privacy and real estate are very big — and employment,” said Cari Brunelle, whose company handles public relations for law firms in multiple fields. “Another hot practice is bankruptcy.”
Overall, though, lawyers and their firms are hurting financially, just like any businesses affected by the reeling U.S. economy and declining daytoday transactions.
According to the online legal publication Law360, as of Friday, 126 major law firms nationwide were cutting their budgets. More than half had reduced lawyers’ salaries and trimmed or eliminated summeremployment programs for law students, while 14 laid off employees and 31 put staff on temporary furloughs, suspending their pay but often maintaining their health coverage.
More than 64,000 people lost their jobs in the U.S. law profession last month, said the Recorder, another legal publication. And the legal service website Clio reported that 49% of the consumers it surveyed in April said that if they encountered a new legal problem, they would probably wait to seek help until the pandemic had subsided.
“Work has dried up in many (law) practice areas,” said Brunelle. “Financial services, large industries, hospitality, retail, so many (businesses) going under. Firms servicing them are being hit hard.”
One such firm, which apparently has avoided the worst blows so far, is Davis Wright Tremaine, a 566lawyer firm that is based in Seattle and has an office in San Francisco. It has reduced pay by 6% to 15% — with the biggest cuts for top executives — and has put 8% of its nonlawyer staff, such as clerks, secretaries, receptionists and legal assistants, on furlough, with health benefits. It has also scaled back its summer lawstudent program.
“There’s not a lot of deals that are closing or starting up” in lawyerheavy transactions such as corporate mergers and acquisitions, said Jeff Gray, a managing partner. He said the firm hasn’t been harmed as much as others because it has a diverse practice, with many cases involving government regulation of its clients. “Regulatory agencies haven’t shut, and there’s a fair amount of work,” he said.
That’s also true for businesses suing insurance companies that have decided businessinterruption coverage in their policies does not apply to losses from closures caused by the coronavirus.
“We’ve been retained by hundreds of businesses large and small,” said attorney Adam Levitt, whose Chicago firm has asked federal courts to consolidate and transfer all such cases to Chicago. The firm has also filed suit in San Francisco seeking refunds of activity fees for University of California and California State University students — a gymnasium fee makes no sense if the campus gym is closed, Levitt said — and is expanding its nationwide staff of 20 lawyers.
The economic slowdown hasn’t reduced the demand for representation of individuals with grievances against institutions, said Liberty, the Oakland attorney who handles claims of physical and sexual abuse and heads the statewide organization of plaintiffs’ lawyers.
“People who have been harmed have time to look for lawyers and talk to lawyers where they didn’t before,” Liberty said. At the same time, she said, “the court system has completely broken down” in California — trials are on indefinite hold, civil cases take a back seat as courts conduct limited business, and some ailing clients may even die before their cases can be heard, drastically reducing the potential damages their estates might recover.
There also will be consequences for court staff, like clerks and bailiffs. No largescale staff cutbacks have been reported so far, but that seems certain to change with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s revised budget Thursday, which proposes massive funding reductions to offset the state’s suddenly looming virusinflicted $54 billion budget deficit. The cuts include 10% to court operations funding in 202021 and 5% for the following year, partly offset by an added $50 million for the expected surge in filings when courts start to reopen.
Chief Justice Tani CantilSakauye called the deficit “sobering” and said the judiciary would work with Newsom and the Legislature to try to maintain service to the public. “No one wants to turn away those coming to our courts to seek justice,” she said in a statement.
Criminal lawyers still have their hands full, even without jury trials. The drop in crime rates hasn’t halted new criminal cases, and elimination of bail for many charges hasn’t ended hearings over whether newly arrested defendants should be held in jail. Pleas must still be entered, cases investigated and witnesses interviewed, under conditions posing new challenges.
“Normally, I sit right next to my client” in court, said Alexandria Carl, a San Francisco defense lawyer who took part in an inperson preliminary hearing earlier this month. “We have close contacts ... a lot of whispering, communication that we like to keep quiet, which is difficult to do from 6 feet away in an open courtroom.” And speaking through a mask made it harder for the court reporter to hear and transcribe her words, Carl said.
In prepandemic times, during prosecution testimony at pretrial hearings a defendant “would tap me on the shoulder or pass me a note, saying what this witness said was not accurate,” said Elizabeth Camacho, who manages felony cases at the San Francisco public defender’s office. “Now they can’t do that. So we came up with a walkietalkie system” by pushing a button on a handheld receiver to transmit whispers between lawyer and client.
Whenever criminal trials resume, Camacho said, they’ll still be impacted by the virus and the surrounding fears.
“Will the jury want to listen or will they be so worried that they will be unable to process the evidence?” she asked. “Masks, social distance — where will they deliberate? This is really a scary time for clients who are in custody awaiting trial.”
A somewhat reassuring answer came from Randy Sue Pollock, a defense lawyer in Oakland just back from a twomonth trial in Lexington, Ky., which she said was the only criminal jury trial in any U.S. federal court during the pandemic. Her client, from Los Angeles, was acquitted of charges involving a shipment of drugs to Kentucky.
When courts were shutting down in midMarch, the trial had been under way for three weeks, and jurors wanted to keep going, Pollock said. She said the judge gave the jury additional seats to allow spacing and constantly cleaned her hands while presiding, unmasked. Masks were made available to the jurors, but only one wore them and the others donated them to frontline workers, Pollock said. She said the jury deliberated in a large room for nine days.
“It’s a miracle that we got to a verdict and no one got sick,” Pollock said.
San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju said his office is as busy as ever, investigating cases, interviewing witnesses and preparing for future trials. District Attorney Chesa Boudin is spending time on the front lines, negotiating and arguing cases in courtrooms or remotely, and getting a closer look at the position to which he was elected in November.
“I’m a trial lawyer,” said Boudin, a former deputy public defender. “I love being in court. I miss it.” His focus now, he said, is “keeping my staff safe, keeping morale up, (in) a tremendously stressful period.”
Berkeley lawyer Cliff Gardner represents defendants appealing their convictions and hasn’t seen a slowdown yet, but he expects one in a few months because of the suspension of jury trials. Visits with clients in prison are also suspended, but they can still exchange letters, and “thank goodness we still have the United States Postal Service.”
“Those of us who have work are happy to have it,” Gardner said. “There’s a lot more serious problems than ours right now.”