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Abstract

The University of Michigan Law School, through its Alumni Survey Project, conducts annual surveys of its graduates regarding their current work and their careers as a whole.  In the surveys conducted in 2022, 2023, and 2024, the Project included questions about the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on various aspects of graduates’ work – their productivity, their co-worker relationships, their client relationships, the balance of their work and family life, and their income – as well as on their work experience overall. 819 graduates who had practiced law fulltime during the pandemic responded to the questions and more than half added comments in their own words about their experiences.

Experiences varied, of course, from enthusiastic to despairing, but the great majority of practitioners reported that the pandemic’s overall impact of their work experience had been either neutral or positive and a tiny percentage reported that it had been “strongly negative.” This pattern was observed in the responses of both men and women, of both those living with children and those living without, and of those working in private firms, in in-house counsel’s offices and in government. For all these groups, two aspects of work correlated far more strongly than any of the others with practitioners’ assessment of the pandemic’s overall impact:  its impact on their productivity and on their balance of work and family life. And it was these two aspects that were most frequently reported as having been positively affected during the pandemic. On the other hand, half the practitioners also reported that their co-worker relationships had been “somewhat negatively” affected during the pandemic.

Asked about their expectations for the coming few years, 38 percent said that they expected to work from home “somewhat more” and 45 percent said they expected to work from home “much more” than they had prior to the pandemic.

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