Dear Clients, Business Partners, Friends and Colleagues,

Six months on from the imposition of new working structures as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is time for an overdue update of where we are and what we are doing.

As far as the office and our working hours are concerned, I am pleased to let you know that we are now back to official closing at 17h00, Monday to Friday; and all lawyers and staff are at their socially-distanced desks.  We continue to implement strict health and safety protocols (see more of that below) and provide private transport for those of our staff who would otherwise travel to the office on public means. 

In as much as we are very well placed to work remotely, we do feel that doing so in a traditional office environment (as long as paramount health and safety measures are observed) does make service delivery more effective and efficient. 

The office health and safety protocols include: -

  - Mandatory hand-washing in our purpose-built facility before entry into the building
  - Mandatory wearing of masks in all parts of our premises that are shared
  - Mandatory temperature-taking through thermal imaging (of the type used by airports and other larger                      public amenities)
  - Ionised spraying of common use surfaces 5x daily with appropriate disinfectant
  - Weekly deep cleaning of the entire office

We consider ourselves lucky that we occupy and control our entire building and compound and are therefore able to monitor and police our protocols very effectively. 

The vast majority of meetings continue to be held through internet media (Teams and Zoom in particular), but we have reopened two of our meeting rooms for physical meetings if these are necessary, subject to clients observing our above protocols.  We appreciate that masks are difficult to wear during meetings and for this reason have dedicated our largest rooms to accommodate. 

This is now our ‘new normal’.  We hope to scale it back – while erring on the side of caution – as time passes and do take the opportunity to thank everyone for their understanding and continued support.   

Michael Kontos

Managing Partner

30 September 2020