By Michele Gorman

Law360 (January 4, 2021, 12:02 AM EST ) As general counsel plan for the new year, they are expecting sleepless nights over the coronavirus vaccine rollout and diversity efforts, among other issues.

For most of 2020, general counsel and chief legal officers played a crucial role in guiding their businesses through the pandemic, facing novel legal issues and risks since the U.S. outbreak of the virus in March.

"The end of the pandemic is in sight, but there will be many more problems for in-house legal teams to tackle before we get there, and I think that will take us well into 2021," said Jill Savage, general counsel at subscription box company Misfits Market.

Here, Law360 looks at four of the major worries that will keep law department leaders lying awake in 2021.

Navigating Pandemic Uncertainties

As the new year begins, the pandemic is the dominant variable for general counsel across industries. They expect the overall uncertainties from COVID-19, which can affect everything from company budgets and work environments to GCs' own mental health and children's educations, will keep them awake at night for at least the foreseeable future.

"COVID is still with us and in full force, and that's the biggest challenge that we face," said Burton Hong, general counsel at refrigeration services company CoolSys. "It's just the uncertainty around it and when it's going to be 'back to normal.'"

Victor Sze, general counsel at airport X-ray developer OSI Systems, said he worries about the health and safety of his company's employees and business partners. OSI's business units have been deemed essential, which comes with both pros and cons, he said.

"We need to keep working. We've kept up production and necessary related activities. But in doing so, we've taken a lot of precautions," he said. "So far, we've been largely successful — we've kept infections to really a minimum, really just a handful, across our global locations."

From a business perspective, the variability and having to adapt to changing circumstances in different regions adds to the challenges, Sze said, adding that he hopes to remain agile and responsive as the pandemic evolves.

"Looking forward, I can foresee more fluctuations and situations in various regions where it's turning the dial up, and then having to turn it down," he said.

A silver lining is that many legal leaders feel they now have a better handle on some of the issues affecting their businesses, including adapting to operating in a remote work environment — a vastly different outlook than they had during the spring and summer of 2020.

"There was a steep learning curve at the beginning, but I feel like we're much better positioned to carry out remote work than we were at the beginning," Sze said.

Handling Vaccine Distribution

With vaccines starting to be administered, a survey released in December by Morrison & Foerster LLP found that in-house attorneys are more optimistic about the long-term impacts of the crisis and the potential for recovery.

But, as several general counsel pointed out, there's still uncertainty related to the vaccines — namely their effectiveness, the timeline for their rollout and whether employees are willing to receive them.

"There's so much uncertainty to the vaccines out there that you really can't make an assessment of how that's going to go," Hong said.

Savage of Misfits Market — which sources and delivers organic produce that farms and stores can't sell because of size, appearance and other imperfections — said that while it's comforting to have vaccines available, COVID-19 will continue to present challenges for general counsel even once the shots are widely available.

"How are we going to manage office reopening when only a portion of the workforce is vaccinated?" she said. "More generally, what role will employers play in the vaccination process?"

For now, Savage said, she and her team are gathering information and staying updated on the news to try to prepare for the next few months.

"Our employees are not health care workers or first responders, so we shouldn't be first in line to receive a vaccine," Savage said. "But if grocery workers and others who are working to provide food to families do receive priority, we'll certainly want to make sure that our fulfillment employees are part of that group."

Stepping Up Diversity Efforts

Amid the challenges of the pandemic, general counsel are worried that diversity, equity and inclusion efforts could take a back seat to other priorities. Caroline Tsai, chief legal officer and corporate secretary at Western Union Co., said lawyers need a renewed focus on this area now more than ever.

"On one hand, there has been progress, but on the other hand, if we're honest, there's very limited progress," she said, adding that in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd last May, "there have been a lot of honest conversations, and many of those conversations continue to be led across industries with GCs engaged in the dialogue."

Throughout 2020, the response to Floyd's death and the Black Lives Matter movement called further attention to racial injustice and the inequities that continue to affect people of color generally and Black Americans in particular. But against the backdrop of the pandemic, attorneys worry the legal profession could repeat the same mistakes it made a decade ago following the Great Recession, when some diversity numbers fell before only recently starting to recover.

As a result, legal organizations implemented programs focused on supporting lawyers in marginalized groups with their career development. In corporate legal departments, top in-house lawyers from a dozen global financial institutions including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America outlined a list of goals for themselves and their peers in an open letter.

"It has to be a top priority, and we have to have a deliberate focus on it, and we can't step away from it during the pandemic," Tsai said. "In fact, I would argue you actually have to double down on those efforts in 2021."

Managing Cybersecurity and Data Privacy

Continuing a trend from previous years, cybersecurity and data privacy remain top of mind for in-house attorneys. Their concerns grew even more pronounced in 2020 as the majority of the workforce went remote, and general counsel expect that worry to continue into the new year.

In MoFo's in-house survey last year, the general counsel who participated ranked the legal risks related to data security and contracts as top areas for liability that they're watching.

Ransomware and malware attacks have increased since the start of the pandemic, and experts have warned of the growing threat to business from cybercriminals taking advantage of the new trend in working from home.

In 2021, some general counsel expect they might need to prepare for the implementation of new laws. Before the pandemic, several states were considering and enacting laws similar to the California Consumer Privacy Act, a landmark statute that gives consumers the right to find out what data online businesses such as Google and Facebook hold about them and to opt out of the sale of that information to third parties.

Savage said she thinks many of the states will return to debating such measures in 2021.

For example, Washington State lawmakers for the second straight year failed to put a proposed privacy law on the books in March, due in large part to the raging debate over whether consumers should be allowed to sue. The proposal would've given residents more access to and control over their personal information.

"Protecting our customers' data is a top priority for us," Savage said, "but complying with the growing patchwork of state laws really does present a continued challenge for GCs of consumer-facing companies."

--Additional reporting by Anne Cullen, Aebra Coe, Martin Croucher and Allison Grande. Editing by Alanna Weissman and Marygrace Murphy.

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