Roger 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.