While the COVID-19 pandemic has wrought hardship worldwide, according to one Springville-based lawyer, changes brought on by COVID have made it possible to help a wider variety of clients.

Like many industries, the legal world was turned on its head during the start of the pandemic. Matthew Morrison, a business attorney who specializes in corporate and franchise law, believes that the pandemic caused the otherwise inflexible legal industry to change in ways he had never previously thought possible.

“COVID has really forced an otherwise slow-moving profession into faster movement,” he said.

According to Morrison, he initially felt uneasy about the shift to online courthouse proceedings and client meetings in the spring of 2020. But as he began to settle into this new world, where conducting business virtually had become the standard practice, he began to see the positives of working from home.

“There have been some glitches as you go along, but at this point, I’ve done dozens of hearings, trials, and appeal work all while sitting at my desk here in Springville,” he said. “Those have been stretched from Cedar City and St. George up to Farmington [and] in between.”

Morrison has, proudly, been able to take appointments with clients in northern Utah at 10 a.m., then meet with clients located in southern Utah by 11:30 the same morning.

“Short of teleportation that would have been impossible three or four years ago … Really it’s reshaped a little bit of my practice as far as feeling like I can bring the kind of service I would to clients right nearby but do that for clients up in Farmington or down in southern Utah,” he said.

Due to reduced travel costs, Morrison said he’s been able to represent clients who may have otherwise not been able to afford his services. He believes this means legal representation can be more readily available to all, not just the affluent, by pairing people with affordable attorneys regardless of location.

“There has been, at the Utah Supreme Court and kind of trickling on down through the State Bar, real desires to meet clients of modest means — to be able to offer services to a wider range of financial backing so that it’s not only the rich who get their legal services,” he said. “It seems to us that it will probably be pretty difficult for courts to go backwards when it comes to accommodations for remote attendance and hearings.”

Although Morrison is now able the help more clients than before, he said that he now needs to make more of an effort to make sure that no client feels like a number.

“If you’re primarily dealing with someone mediated through a screen, they won’t necessarily feel as much of that human touch and human connection,” he said. “So sometimes they feel less like they’re treated like a person and more like they’re treated like a file. So what I see in that is just a need as practitioners to adapt to that marketplace change.”

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