Since he was five years old, David Shrager has been coming to the Frick Building Downtown, first to his father’s law office and then to his own criminal law practice across the street from the Allegheny County Courthouse.
In all that time, he remembers the courthouse being closed for one day — by a blizzard.
Then on March 16, it closed for weeks. Almost everything did.
Mr. Shrager’s work came to a standstill. And the slogan he’s tied to his name: “Don’t be scared, be prepared” became a taunt.
Prepared for what?
All across Pennsylvania, lawyers were juggling a tremendous tension between not knowing what comes next and having to figure it out for their clients.
The volume of legal content that the industry has churned out about the impacts of the pandemic, digesting this totally novel situation in newsletters, bulletins and virtual seminars, is remarkable.
They’ve had to decipher what state and National Centers for Disease Control guidelines meant for employers, what strings were written into stimulus legislation, how court procedures were changing — could witnesses be sworn in online now? Were filing deadlines suspended?
“The urgency that usually drives the practice of law has been largely removed,” a story in the National Law Review summarized. But the work to figure out exactly what that meant for active cases and worried clients was both fevered and urgent.
The Allegheny County Bar Association began Tweeting out webinar invites almost daily -— e.g. “Learn how to coach your client through a crisis” — along with links to attorney-led sculpting cardio classes and reminders to “Deskercise.”
Many law firms immediately furloughed administrative staff as lawyers started working from home.
Within weeks, some of Pittsburgh’s largest firms — including Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, Reed Smith, K&L Gates, and Pepper Hamilton — reduced salaries for attorneys and some did so for staff as well, usually for those making above a certain threshold. The Philadelphia-based worker’s compensation law firm Pond Lehocky, which opened a Pittsburgh office in 2016, filed a notice with the state that it is laying off 76 people. Many firms cancelled their summer associate programs.
Everyone was getting used to Zoom hearings, Zoom depositions, Zoom mediations.
Mr. Shrager spent the first month of the lockdown in a daze. Overall crime was down dramatically. This, of course, was good news.
But the number of domestic crimes began to creep up, and Mr. Shrager noticed his mental health clients getting worse.
“Everybody’s psychic shields are damaged right now,” he said, including himself in the count.
“In April, I drove by one of my billboards [and thought], who even is that person,” he said.
Things have begun to stabilize. His practice’s five attorneys and five staff are back at work and last week Mr. Shrager made his first in-person court appearance since March. It was a case in Cameron County and everyone in the courtroom wore masks and kept their distance, especially from him — after all, he came from Pittsburgh where there are significantly more cases of COVID-19 than in Cameron County.
He couldn’t whisper into his client’s ear. When they needed to talk, even for a small exchange, they walked to a conference room and stood on opposite ends.
Huge shifts — geologic or societal -— happen in one of two ways, Mr. Shrager said: “slowly over time or rapidly with a cataclysmic event.”
He’s hopeful that the current cataclysm will nudge the legal system into a major change -— reforming the cash bail system.
The District Attorney’s office and the courts acted quickly to release as many non-violent incarcerated people as possible to protect them from getting infected with COVID-19. Mr. Shrager is hoping this can be done responsibly without a pandemic hanging over everyone’s heads.
Mediation by Zoom
Terri Urbash, who runs Network Deposition Services, had to reinvent her business overnight. When courts closed and travel was restricted, it meant her court reporters and videographers had nothing to record. She laid off all but three of her 37 employees.
Then, as the world turned to Zoom, so did the legal system. “Everything changed on a dime,” Ms. Urbash said.
“We talked to our clients. We gave them a demonstration over Zoom. And it just happened.”
It can and has been awkward at times. People talk over each other. Dogs bark. Kids cry.
“I’ll say, ‘This is off the record,’ and everyone will look at me like — [obviously],” she laughed.
Still, Zoom mediations are actually catching on. The platform allows the host to set up different rooms and toggle between them.
In a traditional mediation, a mediator goes back and forth between negotiating parties, who are isolated in separate rooms. It’s called “shuttle diplomacy,” and the virtual equivalent — clicking between two sets of participants — is quicker and easier on the knees.
After a recent mediation with four virtual breakout rooms, Ms. Urbash said the mediator called and said he’s considering having all of his future sessions arranged online.
While the company has called all of its employees back to work with the help of a stimulus loan, business is down 60% since the shutdown began, she said. Like everyone else in the legal world, Ms. Urbash is reading the tea leaves on the kinds of cases that will dominate post-pandemic.
The deposition-heavy cases — car accidents, slip-and-falls — are almost certain to decrease in the coming months after a period of far fewer people driving or even leaving their homes. On the other hand, she predicts an uptick in litigation involving COVID-19 cases in nursing homes and medical malpractice.
Lawyers are predicting a wave of litigation related to bottled up evictions, foreclosures, utility disconnections -— all prohibited to a certain extent by certain jurisdictions during the first months of the pandemic.
Inside law firms, employment and labor groups are being kept busy by the upheaval in the workplace, while estate planners are seeing a morbid uptick in demand.
And the one thing everyone seems to think is about to get a lot more popular: bankruptcy law.
Bankruptcy wave coming
When the courts shut down in mid-March, Julian Neiser, a partner with Spilman Thomas & Battle PLLC, was just about to pick a jury for a trail that might have lasted a few days, he said. “To this day, we have no idea when that case is going to pick back up,” he said. “It could be in 2021.”
Most of Mr. Neiser’s work takes place outside the courtroom, so his transition from working behind a desk in his office Downtown to sitting at a folding table in a back bedroom of his house was trivial, he said. The extra effort of placing a fresh bowl of ice cubes under his laptop stand every morning to keep the computer cool is more than offset by the ability to start work within five minutes of waking up.
“I’m way more productive,” he said.
Mr. Neiser specializes in commercial litigation, construction law and intellectual property. These fields aren’t the ones hopping right now.
“Some clients told us to go pencils down on lawsuits. Others, who remembered what 2008 was like, asked for extended terms on existing invoices and an across-the-board reduction in rates — like a 20% [cut].”
The deteriorating financial health of many businesses will change the calculus of how Mr. Neiser advises his clients to pursue contract disputes. “I don’t typically get judgments or enter into transactions unless I know there’s a pot of money to draw from,” he said. “You don’t want a client spending legal fees to drill into a dry hole.”
Recently, he’s has begun to see more small claims — under $10,000 — being filed as clients try to “get to the pot of money first” or secure a place in line as potential creditors before a company goes into bankruptcy.
Many young associates will be repurposed into bankruptcy lawyers, he predicted.
“I’m going to do it [too],” Mr. Neiser declared.
The law is the easy part
As much as we might like to believe that experiencing a universal pain will bring people closer, that’s not how it plays out on police scanners.
Domestic disputes and custody cases have kept Nicola Henry-Taylor, of Henry-Taylor Law, PC as busy as she’s ever been.
“I did not expect to pick up new clients during the pandemic, but we have received new private clients and court-appointed clients,” she said.
Ms. Henry-Taylor’s work typically requires a lot of face-to-face interaction, which has been an adjustment.
A few weeks ago, she had to walk a client through filing a protection from abuse order over the phone. During a Zoom meeting in front of a judge in federal court, she met a new client for the first time online.
All that is surmountable, Ms. Henry-Taylor said. What has been an unexpected hassle is finding a bank to issue her a Paycheck Protection Program loan, which are intended to be issued by banks and guaranteed by the U.S. government to help businesses through COVID-19-related disruptions.
Her business is nearly as small as it gets: there’s one other attorney who works with Ms. Henry-Taylor and two law clerks in training.
If the goal of the program is to help small businesses, she said, “it’s not working [that] way.”
Anya Litvak: alitvak@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1455.
First Published: May 24, 2020, 11:30 a.m.
