How a typical employer in professional, technical and information services operates
A professional, technical or information-services employer sells expert labor through ten functions, each performed at a place, with a counterparty, on an input that a governmental order can reach and did reach. The office, the customer's site, the courthouse, the recorder's counter, the conference, the examination, the visa and the commute are each a subject of orders. The customer base is every other industry this site analyzes, and every one of them was under orders.1
OF, office premises
The office is leased space where staff work, meet, hold files and train juniors by presence, and where depositions, closings and pitches are held. An order that closes workplaces outside the essential list, caps occupancy, prohibits in-person work where remote work is feasible, or imposes workplace infection-prevention and exposure-control requirements (a written exposure plan, screening, distancing and face coverings) changes what the office does and how many people can do it there.2
CS, customer meetings and site visits
Consultants work at customers' premises, auditors count inventory at plants and warehouses, engineers and architects inspect sites, lawyers meet witnesses and close transactions in their counterparties' offices, and technology firms install and support systems in customers' buildings. Each visit requires the customer's premises to be open to outsiders and the professional to be free to travel there; orders closing the premises, requiring quarantine after interstate travel or barring unattested on-site contractors reach this function directly.3
CT, courts, agencies, recorders and notaries
Litigation practices try cases, take depositions and appear before agencies; transactional practices record deeds, file at secretaries of state, obtain notarized signatures and close before clerks; tax practices appear before the Tax Court; immigration practices attend USCIS interviews; intellectual-property practices meet Patent and Trademark Office deadlines. Each venue is a governmental facility under a governmental authority's administrative power, and each closed, suspended its calendar, refused non-essential filings, moved online or capped its rooms during the period.4
EV, conferences and events
Work is won and knowledge traded at conferences, trade shows, bar and CPA society meetings, continuing-education seminars and pitch meetings; media companies sell advertising around live events. Gathering limits, venue closures and travel quarantines reach this function in terms.5
PJ, projects dependent on customers' operations
A construction-administration engagement depends on the site being open, a plant audit on the plant, a deal closing on the parties, lenders, title company and recorder, a shoot on the set and crew. An order that closes any of them delays or interrupts the project and the fees that follow it.6
DC, data centers, installations and field work
Information-services firms run data centers that require staffed shifts, perform installations at customers' sites and run field studies. Essential-workforce designations permitted the shifts only under the exposure controls of distancing, screening and face coverings; customer-site closures barred the installations.7
BD, business development and federal contracting
Proposals, pitches and procurement meetings are how the industry sells. Federal agencies moved to maximum telework in March 2020 and stayed there; federal buildings were capped at twenty-five percent occupancy and placed under the occupational-health controls of Executive Order 13991, face coverings and physical distancing among them, from January 2021; from July 29, 2021 every onsite contractor attested to vaccination status or was tested, masked and distanced; from September 9, 2021 covered contractor workforces were ordered vaccinated. Those are conditions on the sale and performance of every federal engagement.8
HR, hiring, licensing and visas
The industry hires graduates whose licensure depends on the bar, CPA, professional engineering and architect registration examinations, each administered on fixed dates in large rooms; it sponsors foreign specialists whose entry depends on consular appointments and presidential proclamations; it onboards employees by verifying documents in person. The July 2020 bar examination was cancelled, postponed or replaced in most jurisdictions and the 2021 examinations were administered remotely in forty-one and thirty jurisdictions; every Prometric test center closed from March 17 to April 30, 2020; the Department of State suspended routine visa services on March 20, 2020; Proclamation 10052 suspended H-1B and L-1 entry from June 24, 2020 to March 31, 2021.9
WF, workforce availability
The workforce lives in the metros, commutes by transit, has school-age children and travels for work. Stay-at-home orders confined it; school-closure orders kept parents home; quarantine orders removed exposed and returning employees for ten to fourteen days; paid-leave mandates compelled the employer to pay those absences; transit orders reduced service and imposed airborne-transmission controls, face coverings and boarding refusal among them, on every rider; travel quarantines made every interstate assignment a two-week absence.10
CB, the customer base
The industry's customers are the other twenty-six industries analyzed on this site and every level of government. Their closures, caps and re-tightenings, catalogued in their own industry analyses, delayed, interrupted or terminated their legal, accounting, consulting, engineering, advertising and information needs. Under the logic of Q&A-12 of Notice 2021-20 (the "Notice") and the statute's text, an order that closes a customer's operation is an order limiting commerce, and a project suspended because of it is suspended due to that order.11
Revenue lines, seasonality and geography
Revenue is billed by the hour or the fixed fee, by license and managed-service fees, by placements and production fees, by subscriptions and advertising. Tax and audit seasons run from January, court calendars in trial terms, the bar examination in February and July and campus recruiting in the autumn. The industry is concentrated in the largest metropolitan areas, in leased towers served by transit, where the local orders inventoried below were densest and lasted longest.12
The counterparty map
Customers in every industry: the State and local closure, capacity, infection-prevention and vaccination orders on their premises, face coverings among the controls those orders imposed, and the federal workforce orders on federal customers. Courts, agencies, recorders and clerks: the judicial emergency orders of every State and the federal courts, the agency closures and the counter closures. Licensing bodies and examination vendors: the court orders cancelling or converting bar examinations and the vendor closures. Consulates and USCIS: the suspension of routine visa services, the entry proclamations and the USCIS closure. Conference venues: the gathering limits and venue closures of the States and metros. Transit, schools and child care: the conveyance orders, with the face-covering and boarding controls they imposed on every carrier, the school closures and the school face-covering and quarantine orders, the airborne-transmission and exclusion controls under which the workforce's children were schooled, on which the commute and the workforce's availability turned. The orders-by-layer section inventories each class.13