Five years ago this week, on March 8, 2020, I wrote a fairly straightforward blog post on an FAQ for employers in Connecticut about COVID-19. I had been writing about it since January (and I’ll take credit for one of the first law blog posts about it too) but suddenly things seemed to be escalating. I wrote:

Every indication is that the COVID-19 outbreak will get considerably worse before it gets better. One need only look to Italy for such an example. Employers need to be ready now to act.

By the next day, I wrote:

There’s just way too much uncertainty right now.  And while that might lead to business for employment lawyers, the next several months have the potential to turn ugly very fast.

By week’s end, as we started to hear about every business shutting down and layoffs happening, I said it was “brutal” what we were going through.

Hard to believe it’s been five years. What a strange journey we’ve all been on.

I’ll leave it for others to do an entire recap of what’s changed (The New York Times has a notable one here on how we’ve all changed) but I thought of five notable items to reflect on in the employment law area.

In no particular order:

1. Remote work (and work from home) has become a new normal, until it’s not. For some “essential” employers, businesses maintained some weird normalcy with people reporting to work each day — albeit in various degrees of masking. But for many other workplaces, remote work became a part of everyday life. Over time, more of those positions have been returning to the office, but certainly not all. However, remote work had a dramatic impact on accommodations for those with disabilities. Employers were less able to claim being in the office was “essential” when many people were doing just fine working from home. You can find a good recap here.
2. Court cases and administrative agency matters also moved to mostly virtual. Before the pandemic, going to court or going to the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities for a fact-finding or mediation, was not only likely, it was required. In-person attendance chewed up hours of time. But with the pandemic, a lot of that work moved to virtual. No more did you have to travel an hour to a CHRO office for a mediation that was likely to be a waste of time; instead, you could pop on a Zoom (and then Teams) and handle it from anywhere. Same with many routine court matters. Five years later, this trend lives on saving employers and their attorneys valuable time. A nice productivity gain.
3. Sexual harassment cases dropped, but not anymore. Back in the 2018-2019 fiscal year, 279 complaints of sexual harassment were filed with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities. In 2020-21? Just 164. Sure, the “Me Too” movement was certainly part of the bump in cases in the late 2010s, but there should be little doubt that without employees travelling or going to holiday parties or otherwise physically around each other, less incidents of sexual harassment likely occurred. Since then, the numbers continue to go up (200 complaints in 2023-2024), and if my phone is any indication, that number is likely to keep rising.
4. We learned more about vaccine mandates, religious accommodations, and masks. And then wanted to forget them. HR professionals and executives had to do lots of learning over the last several years. Running a business? In Connecticut, you had to comply with all sorts of Executive Orders as to how to open safely. Then came the COVID vaccines. To mandate or not mandate them? Then came the requests for religious exemptions. For the first few years, it seems as though I was fielding daily calls from employers on everything COVID. And then it just….stopped. At some point, many of us just wanted to get back to “normal” even if normal was something different than what we had pre-pandemic. Will we be ready for a bird flu epidemic? Or an outbreak of measles in the office? That’s the big open question now.
5. The practice of employment law has changed too. It’s hard to believe but pre-pandemic, most of the time, the advice that we handed out was either over the phone or, rarely, in person. But suddenly, when the pandemic hit, the use of video-conferencing quickly became the new norm. For the most part, this has actually been positive because clients can both hear AND see their attorneys and trusted connections can be built. But at the same time, I’ve noticed a certain exhaustion that has set in not only with the video conferencing, but with the amount of employment law issues that employers are dealing with. Lately, I continue to field calls on paid sick leave. The COVID Cares Act introduced leave to many employees for the first time; while that leave ended, many states have since adopted paid sick leave. It’s another benefit for employees but for employers, it’s another item to manage and track.

Obviously, this only scratches the surface of the changes we’ve all seen. And despite the challenges we’ve faced, I’m grateful to be on the other side of the COVID pandemic. Let’s hope we don’t face another one anytime soon. If we do, as my friend Kate Bischoff tweeted (remember those?) back in 2020, the “doomsday lawyer” may return.