Just one week after temporarily closing its offices nationwide due to a COVID-19 exposure in its Washington, D.C., office, Faegre Drinker announced that employees in all 22 of its offices will be working from home until March 31 in order to limit social contact among its employees and clients.
“Our priority is protecting the health and safety of our colleagues, clients, visitors and their loved ones,” firm co-chairs Thomas C. Froehle Jr. and Andrew C. Kassner wrote in a statement. “We also want to do our part to contain the pandemic.”
“The cautionary closing of our offices on March 10 showed that we could remain open for business with more than 2,700 attorneys, consultants, professionals, operations and administrative staff around the globe working from the firm’s virtual network, serving our clients and collaborating with one another,” said public relations manager Marylee Moore.
The announcement comes a month after the firm was officially formed by the merging of Drinker Biddle & Reath and Faegre Baker Daniels.
“We committed on February 1 to be a firm designed for clients, putting client needs first and providing excellence without arrogance,” the statement said. “We could not be prouder of the firm’s adherence to those principles over these last challenging weeks … We credit the cultural alignment that attracted our legacy firms to one another from the start.”
Despite the challenges of working virtually in the early days of merger, the firm plans to continue business as usual for its clients, assuring them that “our attorneys, consultants and professionals are just a phone call or email away.”
“Our combination has been and continues to be successful and all of the extensive planning over the past many months has positioned Faegre Drinker to support our clients in the weeks and months ahead,” Moore said.