Many areas of corporate legal life have gone online during the pandemic—staff meetings, courtrooms, e-discovery—and some may even stay that way after lawyers and other company employees are permitted to return to a physical workspace. However even with a wide array of technologies at their fingertips, attorneys may find that the state of contract negotiations won’t look too different than they did prior to COVID-19.

Ronald Prague, executive vice president, chief legal officer and corporate secretary at Synchronoss Technologies Inc., theorized during last week’s Corporate Counsel webinar series “Legal Operations In a Time of Disruption” that many companies may choose to permanently shutter select office locations in an effort to drive greater cost savings and allow employees to work from home. But one aspect of the in-house legal experience that Prague did not expect to remain in a virtual forum is negotiations.