As law firms open up their offices, some familiar faces from the support staff won’t be returning. According to “The Legal Workflow Management Report” released Thursday by workflow and productivity software provider BigHand, law firms have made significant cuts and operational decisions during the pandemic that will continue to leave some staffers out of the office.

To be sure, law firms were shrinking their secretary pools and outsourcing support staff decades prior to the pandemic. But some law firms were still holding onto the administrative model of one secretary working for a senior partner or two. COVID-19 and the transition to a remote workforce, however, forced many to cut back their support staff, according to the BigHand survey of 900-plus law firm respondents from the U.K., North America and Asia-Pacific regions.