Summary: The law firm of Reed Smith announced this week that it has formed an Ebola task force to handle the high amount of inquiries from clients about the outbreak.
The international law firm of Reed Smith started receiving a ton of calls a couple of weeks ago from clients asking about Ebola and protocol containing infectious diseases, according to The Washington Post.
The firm, to handle all of the client inquiries, formed a group of 20 attorneys to answer these questions.
To read more about the Ebola outbreak, click here.
The initiative, being called the “Ebola task force,” was announced on Tuesday by the firm. The attorneys on the task force are in the firm’s offices in the United States and Europe.
Their backgrounds include aviation, employment, health care, insurance and government contracting law.
Four of the attorneys work in the firm’s offices in the Washington area; health care lawyers Julia Krebs-Markrich and Celeste Letourneau, government contracts attorney Lorraine Campos and insurance recovery lawyer Gary Thompson, who is also the managing partner of the D.C. office.
“These are not simple questions or simple answers,” said aviation attorney Patrick Bradley, who is the head of the task force. “Safety and common sense are paramount, but they’re also guided by World Health Organization directives, and each industry has its own regulatory overlay as well. These are complex questions, which is one of the reasons we feel that having a multidisciplinary task force is important so we can provide more holistic answers to questions being raised by Ebola.”
To read more about the WHO, click here.
Campos has been working with contractors who perform aid work and have employees in Africa.
“At this point, most of my conversations have been hypothetical as companies are reading about the few cases here in U.S.,” Campos said. “Many of us are saying, ‘What happens if this should expand?’”
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Image credit: Reed Smith