In a statement, Lawcadia said that the platform is designed to help teams and their senior management “identify, triage and respond quickly” to the multitude of complex legal issues and questions that are arising given the “unchartered territory” being entered into.

“Where in-house legal teams don’t have the expertise or the resources to handle pandemic-related legal issues for their business and government clients, this product also allows work to be channelled to Gadens COVID-19 practice group,” the statement noted.

“Corporate and government legal teams are facing a growing tsunami of legal issues that need to be addressed urgently,” said Lawcadia founder and CEO Warwick Walsh.

“These issues will continue to escalate in number and seriousness over the coming months. We saw the pressure our clients are under, and we identified a way in which we could help them manage issues and also solve the bottleneck of legal work that will emerge as illness and working from home [start] to impact in-house resource levels.”

According to Mr Walsh, the new COVID-19 Legal Workflow product – built using Lawcadia’s existing suite of technology products – will be made available preconfigured with COVID-19-related workflows already built for corporate and government organisations.

It can be enabled in a matter of days, he added, and can be updated over time as more issues come to light.

Gadens chairman Paul Spiro said: “The ability to develop a product to help our respective client bases and get it to market in such a short space of time is a testament to the agility of both our firm and Lawcadia, the quality of our respective teams, and the desire to help our clients in what is going to be an incredibly difficult three, six and 12 months.”

VIEW ALL

Further to the partnership with Lawcadia, Gadens has formed a COVID-19 practice group with specialists across the firm, which will provide rapid responses to the diverse issues that need to be addressed as the outbreak progresses and the ramifications that will follow.

Mr Spiro said that businesses under disruptive stress will be subjected to all sorts of pressures and many will have to make rapid, existential decisions for themselves and their workers. 

"Although many decisions will be forced on them, how organisations respond most effectively will depend on understanding their starting position,” he mused. 

“With so much to consider and in-house counsel already overwhelmed, we’re aggregating our firm-wide knowledge and resources with cutting-edge workflow technology to offer solutions to problems most in-house counsel don’t even recognise they might have.”