Rees Broome’s management has been diligently monitoring the accelerating developments surrounding the coronavirus pandemic and evaluating how we can best serve and protect our employees, clients and communities. We are steadfast in our continued commitment to the health and safety of our employees, clients, friends and families. As such, I wanted to share with you an update on our efforts to protect each other’s health and well-being, while staying focused on our clients’ legal and business needs.
We believe it is absolutely essential to confront and fight this pandemic through social distancing and other ameliorative measures. As such, we have and will continue to transition our operations to a more disbursed and remote work environment. We have always invested in and leveraged our internal systems and technology to give us the ability to work remotely on a large scale while giving us the flexibility to keep our offices fully functioning to provide critical services to our clients.
For those clients who are involved in active litigation matters, state and federal courts across Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia and elsewhere have suspended and generally continued civil and other types of cases. In the case of Virginia, for example, the Chief Judge of the Supreme Court issued an Order Declaring a Judicial Emergency on March 16, 2020 which, with some exceptions, suspends all civil, traffic and criminal matters. In the case of Maryland, Governor Hogan has issued Order on March 12, 2020, promulgating similar measures across state agencies, to include courts. We will closely monitor these circumstances and keep our litigation clients apprised of the status of your cases.
It is always our intent to be accessible and responsive to seamlessly serve your legal needs. If you have any questions regarding our remote work plan, please reach out to any of our attorneys, or to me. No less important, please let us know if there is anything we can do to assist you as you navigate your own challenges. Please know that we are and will remain committed to each of you and look forward to navigating through this difficult period together. We also ask that if any one of our attorneys requests to meet via remote means that you will respect their need to limit in‑person interactions. We are also happy to offer firm resources to assist with facilitating remote meetings with our personnel.
Wishing you well and continued success.
Joel M. Birken