®
oundtable:
Legal landscape Leading lawyers share their perspective on the impact of the pandemic on the sector and adjusting to a new reality.
Alan Higbee
Managing Partner Shutts & Bowen
What was a key takeaway for Shutts & Bowen from the past year? Well, it has certainly been a different year. Shutts has been around for 111 years. During our last partnership meeting, some of our most senior executives walked through all the major events that occurred in the more than a centuryold history of our firm: the Great Depression, two world wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, 9/11, to name a few. Through all of those events, the firm always managed to have an annual in-person partnership meeting – but that wasn’t possible for the first time in 2021 because of COVID-19. It has certainly been a different year, but we are nimble firm and were able to roll with the punches and we have continued to do well and grow. We now have approximately 300 lawyers in eight different offices across the state of Florida. I think our big takeaway for the past year is that you have to stay nimble and be able to deal with whatever comes your way! What is your outlook for Shutts & Bowen? The outlook is good for us. The one thing that we do know is that however the pandemic continues to unfold, we’re going to continue to be trusted and strategic advisers to our clients. We will continue assisting them in getting where they need to go. The world was a complicated place before we threw in a pandemic and it is likely only going to get more and more complex. So, more than ever, clients will need trusted advisers who understand their business and their goals, who can jump in and help them navigate a complex world. Trust is the key word there. Somebody they know is going to do whatever it takes to help them get through whatever the problem is. 48
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Kevin Johnson Shareholder Johnson Jackson
What do you think of the way the courts transitioned into the new reality brought about by the pandemic? There are some long-lasting changes that will come out of this, particularly with the smaller, more routine matters such as hearings on discovery motions. Litigators were used to traveling, to sitting in chambers with judges to deal with short hearings. Now, it’s very likely that we’ll continue to do that via video. That will reduce the need for travel, which will be better for the clients and probably also better for the courts. What we don’t know is what the effect of all these delays will be in terms of the workload for the courts. They have a lot of criminal matters to deal with, they have to deal with other urgent matters and, eventually, they’ll get around to dealing with civil trials, but we think that civil trials will likely be backlogged for a while. How did you help your clients adjust to the new normal of remote work? From a clients’ perspective, a lot of them had to scramble to get set up and figure out how to maintain those connections, how they were going to hold meetings, what their workflow would look like. For all of our clients, there were many questions regarding leave, accommodations, employees who were fearful of having to deal with COVID, and what the risks were in the workplace. We had to be on our toes to give them good advice on how to deal with all of that because the requirements under federal employment law demand a lot of communication, a lot of interactive conversations with the employee. You can’t just set a one-size-fits-all rule, at least not very easily.
