DISTRESSED DAILY: Judges Struggle to Lure Lawyers Back to Court

Returning to the workplace isn’t popular, even when the person urging everyone to come back is a federal judge and the office is a courtroom.

After nearly three years of remote court hearings, judges in America’s busiest bankruptcy districts recently began asking lawyers to come back to the courthouse. Attorneys, it turns out, would rather not.

“We assumed everybody would come roaring back,” David Jones, chief judge of US Bankruptcy Court in Houston said. “We could not have been more wrong.”

During the pandemic, Zoom and its competitors became permanent fixtures in America’s legal system, occasionally resulting in hilarity ...