I remember the day vividly.
It was early March 2020. Everyone was instructed to work remotely for the day, a relatively routine business continuity exercise to stress-test the work-from-home environment.
My team didn’t think much of it, shifting meetings around to when we'd all be back in the office. I distinctly remember the hymn of the repetitive instant message saying, "Let's just review this in person tomorrow when we're back."
Later that evening, the state of emergency notification came through.
We weren't coming back tomorrow. And in hindsight, we never really did.
What many of us thought was a business continuity exercise turned out to be something else entirely: a preview of the future.
Before COVID, in-house legal workflows still had physical elements. E-signatures had existed for years, but wet signatures were still common and completely normal. A contract would get printed, reviewed, approved, and then walked over to the authorized signatory.
It wasn't unusual. It was just how things worked.
Then almost overnight, those workflows didn’t just stall, they became obsolete. The physical handoffs. The paper routing. The casual "let me just walk this over" collaboration—all of it disappeared. Leaving us to not just question when we’d return to it but why it ever really worked at all.
We had to digitize, and quickly. E-signature went from convenience to absolute necessity. Physical files became impractical artifacts of another era (one I’d soon revisit).
At the same time, the role of in-house legal began to shift. Before COVID, many legal teams operated in a reactive posture. Agreements came in, risks were assessed, issues were addressed.
During the early pandemic months, legal departments found themselves helping design entirely new ways of working. Questions started appearing everywhere:
Legal teams weren't just reviewing the business anymore. We were helping reshape it. And for many of us, that shift from gatekeeper to architect was long overdue.
When everyone is working in the same office, the value of legal work is often seen simply through proximity. You're physically present, collaborating, walking down the hall to solve problems.
When everyone is remote, that visibility changes.
Legal teams (and me nearly daily at the outset) were asking the age old question: How do we demonstrate the value of the work we're doing (when people don't see us doing it)?
The answer increasingly became data. Contract output. Negotiation timelines. Sales support metrics. Project tracking. Volume trends. The pandemic didn't create legal data, but it exposed an uncomfortable truth: many of us had been flying blind for years. Intuition was no longer enough; we needed proof in data and how to understand and leverage it.
One of the most interesting dynamics of remote work for me to witness and be a part of was how it affected productivity.
On one hand, many people (myself included) found they could work more efficiently. Without the daily commute and constant office interruptions, focus time increased.
But there was an antithesis: the "always on" problem. Laptops were always nearby. Slack and email migrated onto phones. The line between work and life became blurrier. Before the pandemic, leaving the office meant leaving work behind. Now my laptop can sit at my desk, or on the kitchen or coffee table moving fluidly as I do from room to room – a flexibility that sometimes toes the line of tether and freedom.
As organizations grappled with this new reality, a different realization began to emerge: maybe the real question wasn't where people were working from, or even when they were working. Maybe the real question was whether the work was getting done.
Across many companies, office space gradually became optional rather than essential. For legal teams, that shift prompted new conversations about what efficient work and collaboration actually look like—and how to measure success based on outcomes rather than physical presence.
Speaking of office space, about a year and a half into the pandemic, my company at the time began shutting down its office space.
Behind my desk sat filing cabinets filled with paper records—contracts, documents, and agreements stretching back years. I was tasked with revisiting and digitizing these impractical artifacts of another era so we could truly put an end to the filing cabinets.
I’ll never forget how symbolic going through those cabinets truly was, because it was no longer about having a place for the filing cabinets. It was about having a place for the files, and that place wasn’t physical. Just success was no longer about physical office presence but measurable impact – a near perfect metaphor.
As legal teams continue evolving beyond the digitization inevitably caused by the pandemic, the next shift is well underway: artificial intelligence.
If you’ve heard me speak or seen any of my LinkedIn posts, you know my favorite analogy: AI is not here to replace lawyers. It’s here to give us superpowers.
Automation can streamline repetitive workflows. Integrated systems can create shared sources of truth across departments. AI-assisted tools can surface insights that once required hours of manual review.
The result? Lawyers spend less time navigating administrative complexity and more time focusing on nuanced decisions that actually require legal expertise. A life preserver thrown to the “always on” legal mind heading to burnout.
Six years ago, many organizations were focused on finding a "new normal." But the reality today is different. We're no longer simply adapting to a new environment. We're refining it.
We're improving workflows. We're elevating collaboration. We're rethinking how legal teams operate inside modern organizations.
We're not creating new normals anymore. We're improving and revolutionizing the ones we already have. The question is no longer can legal teams evolve? It’s how fast can we go?