Quite a few of my friends have told me they are enjoying enforced home-working during lockdown. Putting the associated pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic to one side (particularly home-schooling!) for the purpose of this blog, I know quite a few solicitors who are happy to be working from home.
For those solicitors who ordinarily commute for 2-3 hours a day, they have gained precious time at home and/or with their families that they did not have before. They have discovered that there are more hours in the day to walk the dog or do an on-line work out. They have re-discovered a little bit of their lives that they had previously lost to their jobs.
I also know other solicitors who have not been treated desperately well by their firms, including heavy handed furloughing, salary slashing and redundancy. Before you all snap back at me that these are justifiable actions taken to safeguard the long-term financial health of law firms, I know that. It is the way firms go about implementing those measures which are important. We are sufficiently intelligent to understand why cost cutting measures are put into place, however it is the way they are delivered which will leave the lasting memory.
Some solicitors have been asked to work from home with little or no support, pastoral or technological. They have not been invested in, either before lockdown or during it. So many firms have not previously had the infrastructure to do anything other than require solicitors to go to the office to work every day and have struggled to implement secure and workable systems quickly or at all.
If any of these experiences resonate with you, like many other solicitors you may be asking yourselves if you want things to go back to how they were before? Or if you would rather return to work with a better balance between work & home?
For those solicitors, Cognitive Law can offer a solution. Because we have always been agile it was relatively painless for us to react quickly to lockdown. And because we were already set up for this way of working, we have remained stable and in relatively good shape. Like many other businesses, lockdown has brought our solicitors closer together. We have had Office 365 and Teams for some time, but now we are really getting the benefit from it. We have group chats and video calls far more than we ever used to, maximising the infrastructure and technology that we already had in place.
I promise you that I am not gloating. The legal industry has taken a hit, like many other sectors. Some of our solicitors are busy, some are not. Ironically though, that is why this is a good time to move to consultancy. Not just because it gives back some lost freedom and reduces the stress of balancing life and work; but because there is no immediate pressure to build up a busy caseload.
Cognitive Law provides all new consultant solicitors with training – from setting up a limited company to finding an accountant to using our cloud-based Case Management System. And that can all be done remotely too. What better time to get to grips with a career move than when things are a little bit quiet anyway?
Like I said, becoming a consultant solicitor during lockdown is not as crazy as it sounds. Cognitive Law is already set up to provide clients with smart thinking, readily available, flexible, expert legal resources, so if you’re wondering how you are going to deal with going back to the office we would love you to check out our Join Us page, or get in touch with us to have a chat.
Feel free to contact me on lucy.tarrant@cognitivelaw.co.uk, or call me on for a 0333 400 4499.