Worldwide impact of covid on the law firms

 This covid time has been really tough for the whole world and it affected almost everything right from the health of the people to the businesses and everything else related to humans. While most of the people suffered the hardest part of this pandemic of loosing loved ones most of them suffered in other ways like losing jobs, losing business and stuck far from the family during the lockdown.

There were many businesses that has to be stopped as people were not able to do anything amid the lockdown and there were no chances to get out of it soon. Schools started running online, coaching, teaching and other official works also started online systems as the humans has no options left except being behind the closed doors.

But when we look a few months back the pandemic is getting slower and thank fully the impact of corona virus is getting down. So, in this particular period if we talk about how covid affected the law firms in London, we must say that in the entire duration of the pandemic the UK law sector has remained quite stable except some areas of law, as legal aid firms have struggled with over 70% closing since April 2020. A reputed monthly survey showed that the annual turnover of UK’s legal sector has remained the same where the other industries and the annual turnover fell by 14%.

Since the July2021, the government is giving guidance for working from office as there have been no restrictions to contact with other people and working from home culture is on the end slowly. According to the government official guidance is no longer present but they expect people to return for the work gradually. Most of the law firms in London have seen this start to happen although the issues like self-isolation are continued to occur until the rules are relaxed completely on this.

There are the types of law services which faced some downfall and some a surge during pandemic like private clients, employee and employer legal issues, family issues, litigation, personal injury etc. The cases of litigation and personal injury were long running and was largely unaffected by the pandemic but yes, the response time from the other side was slowed it down. The work was running as it has to be but the working from home culture changed everything and the process started to take longer than usual for example if somebody claimed to the insurance company, so they were unable to respond in time as everyone has adapted to work from home and court redress was potentially removed.

The second potential area to talk about of legal sector in UK is the commercial and corporate area where in the first lockdown firms have seen a significant drop in the inquires and pausing of the instruction the majority of matters. The issues this area is majorly facing are that current transaction are not completing and pipeline projects are still in phase of future uncertainty. The start of the year saw slowest rate of making new deals, new inquires generated so the pipelines works are impacting the income of companies as well as the employees.

In short, we can say this pandemic has changed the work culture and also the speed of pipeline projects as it put down a pause to almost everything. Legal sector is one of them to suffer from a huge change because of work from home culture. It will take a lot of time to come back to the state of completely relaxed work culture as it was before pandemic