Team size: Six

Focus on…How the Covid-19 pandemic changed the work of in-house lawyers in the restaurant business

The Covid-19 pandemic changed all our lives all over the world and has affected the hospitality industry greatly. This also changed our focus and daily work as lawyers in the legal department of a restaurant company. In Germany, for almost two and a half years, we were confronted every week, sometimes even every day, with new legislations in each of the 16 federal states. Within a short time, we had to give legal instructions to our restaurants to be compliant with the applicable law. The focus in a restaurant should be to provide great products and service, but suddenly, legal rules (collecting customer data for traceability, and checking if customers are vaccinated, recovered, or tested) were the first thing to think of for our employees.

One legislation for whole Germany was our dream, but due to the federalism in Germany it did not happen.

All the limitations, such as the closure of restaurants or dine-in areas, and limitations concerning the customers who can visit a restaurant and curfew, resulted in a huge business impact, and made us think about new areas of business. We implemented and increased our delivery services. As a result, leasing agreements for cars, bikes, scooters, new employment agreements for drivers, insurance and contracts with delivery companies were our focus in the legal department for this implementation.

Due to the Covid-19 legislation, we were forced by the authorities to close restaurants for some time, but still had to pay the full rent without making business. Neither did a law exist for such cases which gave us the right to reduce rent before Covid-19, nor had we clauses in the agreement which would help us to get a rent reduction for closing times. During the pandemic, the government implemented a new law for such cases, but this still did not give us the right just to reduce rent in cases of closures forced by legislation. Therefore, another new focus in the department was the negotiation of amendments concerning rent reduction due to Covid-19.

What have we learned? As an in-house legal team and as the general counsel of such, you need to be flexible and be able to react in the short term. While before the pandemic, we were busy with M&A projects, new lease agreements due to growth and expansion or new franchise agreements, we suddenly were occupied by Covid-19 legislation, amendments to lease agreements for rent reduction, questions around technical unemployment and delivery agreements. We need to be generalists and to be able to adjust our work from one day to the other to be able to manage what happens tomorrow.

And even if we have many legislations in place, they never cover all life situations and need to be adjusted from time to time to react to current events in the world.

But this all makes our work as in-house lawyer varied and interesting. I would not swap it for the world!