Late January 2020: Chris McDaniel was discussing cybersecurity at a conference in Phoenix when he and other law firm chief information officers started receiving eerily similar emails from their bosses. The message was simple but profound: the novel coronavirus was spreading, so please prepare for everyone in the firm to work from home.

“Holy shit,” McDaniel remembers thinking. Then he and his 15-member team at Atlanta-based Smith Gambrell & Russell got to work planning how nearly 450 people could remotely access the firm’s network.