Roger Quillen of Fisher Phillips. Photo: John Disney/ALMRoger Quillen has been the head of labor and employment firm Fisher Phillips for more than 20 years, but he’s never seen anything like the coronavirus crisis. It’s forced his firm, which has more than doubled its revenue in the past decade to $222.5 million, to push beyond its usual boundaries. And it’s laid the groundwork for lasting changes Quillen anticipates in the way firms operate. In this interview, which took place in late April and has been lightly edited for length and clarity, he discusses employers’ shifting legal needs, demand fluctuations and an expected wave of employment-related work bigger than his firm has ever seen.
Ben Seal: What have the past two months been like for you and the firm?
Roger Quillen: Completely not normal. When we think about our firm and COVID-19, we’ve got to think about it on two levels. The most important one is starting with our own people. From the beginning of this we’ve been doing our best to keep in touch with every local office, to see how people are doing, to be sure our people are safe and making good decisions. We were pretty quick to tell people to no longer come into the office, even before the first shelter-in-place order. We are in many of the cities where those early shelter-in-place orders came out: San Francisco, Seattle, New York, New Jersey, Louisiana, Chicago—almost every city that is tops on the map for a COVID outbreak, we have significant offices there. So we started very quickly getting people working from home and staying in touch to be sure everybody’s OK.
I’m very pleased to be able to say today that we have been very fortunate not to have any immediate tragedies regarding this illness and very few cases of positive tests. I’m also very pleased that investments we made in technology over the prior two years put us in a fantastic position to be able to work from home. We made the decision about three years ago to make massive investments in technology. In 2018, on top of normal spend, which most law firms would say is about 4% of revenue, we invested a marginal $2.5 million in technology, and in 2019 we invested a marginal extra $2 million. We were doing that because we wanted to be stronger, more effective, more client-facing, but what a fortunate thing to have completed that roadmap toward IT progress in time for the coronavirus. The steps we took to be technologically much stronger put us in a position where practically with the pull of a lever we were able to send everybody out of the office to work from home and not miss a beat. Our billables in March were a record high and in April we’ve seen that continue.
That’s the personal side of it for us, our people and being concerned about their well-being. But the other big half of the equation is our clients. I’m very pleased to say we turned on a dime. In a matter of a few days we had amassed nearly 40 lawyers in the firm who were willing to commit themselves practically around the clock to developing outstanding COVID-19 resources for our clients—and not just for our clients, by the way. We posted it on our website as a public service. Very quickly it became the No. 1 place for many businesses and trade associations to go for their COVID-19 employment information. And then equally quickly, when the shelter-in-place orders began to define what was or was not an essential business, we had a subgroup that over just a few days established a fantastic resource center for that specific subset of COVID-19 issues. Are you or are you not an essential business? If you are, are there limits on what you can do? Then, when the federal government came out with this big relief package we very quickly pivoted and threw resources into the Small Business Administration loan program, which is not normally a part of our core practice, but our clients very much needed that help. Then just a week ago we pivoted our online resource center to focus on back-to-work issues.
There’s never been a time in my career when I’ve seen so much quick adjusting going on to circumstances, and I think we’ve hit it out of the park.
BS: Do you think this crisis will help law firms learn to be more nimble and to more quickly adapt and innovate when needed?
RQ: I’m sure that will be a firm-by-firm phenomenon. Our firm focuses entirely on workplace law. Every single new issue that affects American life finds its way quickly to the workplace. So if you are an L&E firm like us, then you already, almost by definition, are adaptable. For us to do what we do, we are adapters.
When COVID hit, I was at our annual Inside Counsel Conference, on Feb. 23. This was at a time when the president was still saying we don’t have a problem here. We were on top of this. I stood in front of the attendees on the first day of this two-day conference and said, “This is an issue of concern to many of you. Would you be interested if we were to adjust our program to add a segment tomorrow morning at 7:15 on COVID-19?” Every hand on the floor went up. So one of our workplace safety experts stayed up all night to put together a presentation. That is what it means to be a great L&E firm. This will really energize the movement among the big L&E firms to be super agile and ready to adjust.
But there are other law firms that in terms of their philosophy probably won’t be affected much. There won’t be one adjustment for the industry—some law firms will be all the better for it and some law firms will probably learn very little.
There are things that we’re all going to learn. Learning how effectively and how efficiently we can work remotely is a lesson that will never be forgotten.
BS: Do you anticipate any significant lasting effects on either the business of law or the practice of law when the coronavirus pandemic concludes?
RQ: We’ve developed remote work policies for our people and remote work schedules and we’ve been doing them mostly in the interest of being able to attract and retain top talent. But remote access to technology has always been seen as the outlier experience that we were accommodating. That has changed forever. We now see remote work and remote data access as the most natural thing in the world. I think this will have profound implications for the future for all law firms and probably all industries. From now on we will consider this to be a daily plausible alternative.
I think it will have profound implications for space planning for the future. As we approach each lease that’s rolling off—and we’re in 36 cities, they roll off at the rate of three to five a year—every time we’re facing a new lease situation I’m confident we will be looking at our space needs through the new lens we’ve developed thanks to all of this remote work. In Atlanta in particular we have a lease that’ll be expiring at the end of 2022, and as we approach the new lease in Atlanta, I’m confident we will be reassessing our need for physical space in a traditional office.
In the future when we’re planning an office, we may be planning for any person to be in the physical plant maybe two or three days a week. What would that mean in terms of the need for space?
BS: What have you seen in the employment context through the first couple months of this crisis that has surprised you?
RQ: I can’t say I’m surprised because we were very quick to anticipate what would happen as a result of this. We were not at all surprised about the wave of furloughs and layoffs, and we were certainly not surprised that clients who were not deemed essential businesses had to close temporarily. We sought consultation almost immediately from two different sources we turn to for expertise about what to expect when it comes to the likely impact on the American business world. Many weeks ago we were already seeking consulting advice about what we might see. We began to adjust our business plans way back then.
In terms of the employment issues that have arisen, they would be the ones you might expect. As employers are going through their workforces and engaging in mass layoffs, there are bases that employers have to touch. You’ve got to do these things in a certain way, so they turn to us for help with that. When you’re talking about picking and choosing who gets to work, who gets to stay, that raises all sorts of discrimination issues.
I’m happy to say I haven’t been surprised by how our practice would be affected.
BS: What have clients been asking for that seems new?
RQ: Our scope of practice has always been pretty narrowly defined. We handle issues of the workplace on behalf of management. We have found ourselves pulled into areas we would not have considered to be our core practice areas. We were very responsive. But we saw that one of the early issues under the shelter-in-place orders was whether one of our clients was deemed an essential business or not. That’s why we launched a practice group right away to focus on that, and to be prepared to help our clients work their way through those hoops. The phones rang off the hook with calls about that.
And likewise, the dust had not even settled on the establishment of that practice group and all of a sudden the stimulus package came out of Washington and the question was whether someone met the standards for those small-business loans, and how they have to conduct themselves to ensure those loans are forgiven. We wouldn’t normally consider ourselves to be Small Business Administration loan attorneys, but we developed a practice group very quickly to deal with those issues because our clients were turning to us with questions that were outside our normal scope. When this is all over we’ll go back to our core practice, but during this short time we’ll continue to adapt and provide services as needed.
BS: What has demand looked like at your firm?
RQ: The first thing we saw was a significant spike in demand. Our lawyers were working seven days a week and they struggled to keep up with the demand. In the beginning, all of the new COVID-related work came in on top of all the other work the lawyers still had to do. So on a per-attorney basis we saw a significant increase in lawyer productivity for the first two to three weeks. But as state after state issued those shelter-in-place orders, we certainly have seen a slowdown in our traditional work. With many courts in the country having basically put their dockets completely on ice, we’ve seen a significant reduction in our traditional litigation practice. But so far all of that COVID-related work, which is morphing constantly as every phases of this continues to unfold, so far it has almost completely made up for our loss of that more traditional work.
Here’s what I anticipate happening: As businesses begin to come back online, we are going to see a wave of employment work the likes of which has never been seen in our firm’s history. Employers who were scrambling to make business-saving decisions on an emergency basis, while they were seeking a lot of advice, when you’re moving that fast and making that many decisions, you’re going to do things that will generate claims in the future. Plaintiffs lawyers will be very active and very creative in coming up with causes of action to challenge the steps that employers took.
Labor unions all across the country are working with groups of employees to protest what they say are insufficient safety practices, insufficient equipment in the workplace. I predict that our traditional labor lawyers will be the busiest they’ve been at any time since World War II. I think unions will see this as their great day in the sun and they will become more active than we’ve seen in all those decades.
BS: Few firms have been able to maintain the level of consistent revenue growth that yours has over the past several years. Do you see any limits on the firm’s expansion?
RQ: During my nearly 21 years of leadership we have never had a specific growth goal. Our growth has been the result of developing great client relationships who want us to be in more places because they have needs in more places. They encourage us to expand our footprint because they need us for more work. I start every year saying to myself and our leadership team, what can we do to position ourselves to get more and more of these great national clients and attract more and more of the top talent in the field. It just seems that over and over again the answer is there’s a city we need to get into.
BS: Has your firm had to shelve any important projects or plans it had for 2020 as a result of the crisis?
RQ: We canceled our all-attorney meeting scheduled for Denver. We have not put on hold any expansion plans; however, we have been actively pursuing lateral partner candidates in many locations, and almost all of those have been put on hold. There were a couple that got in just under the wire, but there were others that when we saw what was happening by early to mid-March, our recruiting department was on the phone to people saying we’re still very interested but it wouldn’t make sense to do this now.
BS: What keeps you up at night?
RQ: If you asked me that question in any other era I would say what keeps me up at night is worrying about the brand, because it’s all about the brand. We don’t want to do anything that undermines our reputation as one of the great L&E firms in the country. In this era of social media and social media shaming being such a phenomenon, that’s a new factor that should worry every business leader every day. What’s happening that you haven’t heard about yet that has the potential to hurt your brand in the marketplace?
But in this era, what keeps me up at night is worrying about the great unknown of this pandemic. Is it going to have a second wave? Are our clients going to be able to get back to business? If they can, 2020 could turn out very well, and if not it’s going to be a hard year. I worry about our people. Every day I try to check in to say, “Is everybody OK?” I hear reports about family members that are ill. I’ve heard reports about family members that have passed away. It’s very scary. What keeps you up at night has definitely changed.
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Fisher Phillips' Roger Quillen Sees an Unprecedented Wave of Employment Work on the Way | The American Lawyer - The American Lawyer
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