Ch. 2, PART 5: Can You Be a Socially Distant Lawyer and Still Go to a Conference? The Burning Question is Now Answered.

True to my prior post, your SDL has now been to the CLM Annual Conference in Palm Desert, California and the Magna conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. I also plan to travel to Austin, Texas for the DRI Trucking Conference at the end of the April.  All of this travel and conference attending doesn’t appear to be very “socially distant”, does it?

Your SDL submits the answer lies in how you define the phrase, “the new normal.”  Let’s face it, “normal” has been cancelled.  We are just in the world of “new,” for better or for worse.  We live in a world of hand sanitizer (which isn’t bad thing) and a lot of outdoors professional events.  Our friends and colleagues are still getting COVID-19 or some variant thereof.  In short, the coronavirus doesn’t seem to be done with us just yet.

Because of these factors, there still is a reasonable hesitancy concerning business-based human interaction.  In our practice, we now have accepted that virtual depositions and mediations are here to stay.  Recently, your SDL’s law firm had an in-person court appearance for a routine conference where all the attorneys were clearly nonplussed that the court did not opt to conduct a virtual conference. I was surprised by how outwardly annoyed my co-counsels were to attend court.

All these factors are still relatively “new” as being standard, but they are becoming more and more ingrained in our practice and way of doing business. 

Thus, the SDL is still a fact of this life, at least for now.