After 68 episodes and 75 guests, I am concluding the In Seclusion Podcast miniseries today with special guest, David Lat from Lateral Link. Back in March, David announced he had contracted COVID-19, and spent some two and a half weeks in the hospital, much of that time in the ICU. For many of us in the legal industry who knew David from his days running Above the Law, his experience with the virus made the issue very real for us and we followed Twitter and the news closely as he finally came out of the hospital, and is now working to get back to full strength.

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I asked David to come on and be the final guest because I wanted to ask him if we, both as a legal industry, and as a society, have really learned anything from this experience of a global pandemic and disruption to our normal work and life routines. He gave me three things that he thinks we have learned.

  1. We’ve learned to work successfully on a remote basis. This is no small deal for the legal industry who stressed the need to be in the office.
  2. Lawyers and legal professionals have learned how to use more technology tools in a more effective and efficient way.
  3. It turns out that lawyers can learn new tech when they are forced to. We all have gained a great perspective of what’s truly important to us in our work and in our personal lives.

While we may eventually go back to some of our old habits, I think the stories that have been shared on this podcast show that we are not the same industry or the same people we were at the beginning of 2020. We had a tipping point in the way we view what it means to work, and how we treat ourselves, our colleagues, and those who don’t look like us. I think we all hope that when the virus is no longer a direct threat to the lives of millions, we will be better people. Here’s to hope.