Last month, as widespread layoffs loomed in the U.S. economy and businesses stood on the verge of shuttering their offices amid the coronavirus outbreak, the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr sent all of its employees home with equipment to telework.

On March 13, the firm used a Friday to run an experiment—to gather a sense of how it would function with most of its lawyers and staff working from home.