Piper Alderman: Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update

How can you and your business respond to Coronavirus (COVID-19)? Find out here.

Like your businesses, we are continuously monitoring COVID-19 developments to both contain the risk of the virus and ensure the health and safety of our people and their families, our clients and the community. We have set up a dedicated response team to monitor the situation and respond appropriately.

Health and Wellbeing

We have put in place the following measures to address the health and wellbeing of our people and our guests:

• We have distributed our ‘Pandemic Action Plan’ to all staff to ensure transparency of the framework to be used to guide decision making. This plan includes a dedicated response team to be agile in times of constant change .
• We have commenced weekly communication to provide regularity to internal updates and we will assess the need to increase this communication on a daily basis.
• We are promoting the use of the building management containment facilities such as hand sanitisers at various locations such as entries, building reception and lift wells.
• We have increased focus on employee, client and visitor hygiene management within all four offices, including increased frequency of cleaning of all common areas, placement of hand sanitisers in high traffic areas (including reception, kitchens, bathrooms and meeting rooms), regular print and digital communication on best practice hygiene advice and ways to minimise risk of infection around the office.
• As has become common practice, we are requiring all visitors to advise us if they are not healthy, have recently travelled to high-risk regions identified by Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) or have been in contact with someone with COVID-19.
• We are promoting rest and recovery with any early signs of cold/flu and testing where it meets the health guidelines.
• We are maintaining a travel register of domestic and international travel.
• We have placed restrictions on internal and external events, including Continuing Legal Education, hosting of 40+ people client events and reduction on attendance at external events unless assessed as low risk.
• We support remote and flexible working by encouraging and facilitating use of appropriate technology.
• We are supporting our staff and their families through our existing Employee Assistance Program to reduce anxiety often associated with pandemics.

Travel

We have in place a range of travel restrictions and self-isolation requirements for our people, which are being reviewed in line with our Pandemic Action Plan and communicated daily as appropriate.

We are basing our travel prohibitions in line with DFAT “Do Not Travel” advice currently in place.

Any international travel for clients or the firm needs prior approval from leadership.

Business Continuity

We are confident of our ability to continue to deliver our clients exceptional service. We do not anticipate that there will be any material impact on our capacity to deliver the same exceptional level of  service to our clients as we did prior to COVID-19, from our office or remote.

Our business continuity plan has been regularly updated to ensure we can continue to deliver a high level of service to our clients remotely. Combined with our Pandemic Action Plan we have the necessary plans to adjust operations if rapid escalation was to occur.

The safety and wellbeing of our employees, clients and visitors is at the forefront of our priorities. Our business continuity plan includes having core staff rostered (taking appropriate infection and transmission control measures) to continue to support our services (e.g. printing and couriering, technology hardware and other business support services), and enabling technology infrastructure.

We will assess the suitability of face to face meetings on an ongoing basis.

Further Information

If you have any queries regarding our response measures please contact our Managing Partner, Tony Britten-Jones.

Update  – 4 August 2020

Pursuant to Victorian Government COVID-19 directives, our offices at 459 Collins St will be closed from 4pm on Wednesday, 5 August 2020 until further notice.

Please note that no deliveries or attendance at our offices will be allowed during this period and all mail will be re-directed to our Adelaide office.