Coronavirus and the General Counsel

Darshan: I wanted to talk today about the coronavirus and what is the role of the general counsel and what are some considerations for the general counsel/chief compliance officer. Narrator: This is the DarshanTalks podcast. Regulatory guy, irregular podcast with host Darshan Kulkarni. You can find the show on Twitter @darshantalks or the show's website at darshantalks.com. Darshan: This can have differing roles depending on the size of your organizations. This can have differing roles depending on the maturity of your organization. Some of the things you want to start thinking about is, well is the general counsel even supposed to be involved? So I did a little bit of research and again, obviously depends on how your organization sees it, but the general counsel is responsible for maintaining knowledge of the organization's operations and legal documents and promulgating and creating directives of corporate acts and decisions. So I would argue that, yeah, the general counsel, the chief compliance officer has a role in making sure that for the companies involved in this process and what is that role supposed to look like. Darshan: So let's take a step back. Let's talk about the coronavirus. So the coronavirus is actually a type, it's a family of viruses and we had MERS and we had SARS a few years ago. Those all fall within that same virus family, if you will. And what we have now is something called C-O-V-I-D 19 or COVID 19 and that's just another one of them. Obviously it's spread significantly and it's caused global panics in many ways. But that's really what we're talking about. So the real question then comes out, what is the role of the general counsel in these situations? And I think that what you have to after take away is the fact that there's an inside role and there's an outside role. Darshan: And when you're talking about the inside role, you're really talking about what are the connections to the employees, what are the connections to the board of directors, and what do you need to do in those scenarios. So from that perspective, you want to think about the OSHA general duty clause, which basically requires that employers provide employment and a place of employment which is free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause the death or serious harm to employees. Darshan: So an employer, has an affirmative duty to protect employees from things like a pandemic virus. And I'm not sure we necessarily are in the world of pandemics right now, but there's an argument out there. So the Federal Protecting America's Workers Act, or I guess it could be considered power expanded coverage to the public sector in general. So, that's one consideration, just pure OSHA requires it that you, it requires that you make sure that you are protecting your employees in the best way possible. So let's consider that one step further. If you have global operations, which is true for a lot of pharmaceutic companies and for some healthcare companies, you need to start looking at the state department website, looking the CDC, looking at what the FDA is doing. Darshan: For example, China and Italy have restrictions on travel. China, they actually go out one step further and they recommend against traveling to China. Italy actually they have a level three, I believe, essentially saying that we'd recommend against traveling to Italy. So keep an eye out to see what you really need to get into and if your employees really need to be there. If an employee has been in a real coronavirus hotspot, maybe consider making them stay a full 14-day incubation period at home. It doesn't really matter in this world if they work remotely, maybe they can work remotely this time. And you want to start thinking about, well,