MBHB Preparedness Plan Regarding Coronavirus / COVID-19: March 19 Update

To MBHB Clients and Friends:

Like you, McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP (“MBHB”) is closely monitoring news regarding the Coronavirus / COVID-19 pandemic. As always, our primary goals are to maintain the health and well-being of our employees and to provide our clients with seamless, uninterrupted service in a proper, secure, and efficient manner.

We wish to assure you that we have made the arrangements required to continue our ongoing work and to provide you with full professional support. Among other things, we have arranged for all MBHB employees – including legal practitioners and staff – to be connected by computer in a “Work From Home” (WFH) setup. Our computer systems are up-to-date and ensure that our practitioners and staff have full remote access to your files on our network. Our systems also ensure that our communication channels continue to operate as they otherwise would. As such, you can continue to reach us using our regular phone extensions, mobile phone numbers, and email addresses.

We implemented these measures for our clients’ benefit to enable us to continue providing our clients with the best possible legal services as we navigate the recent developments concerning the pandemic. We can also assure you that our WFH status will have no adverse effect on our procedures for protecting and safeguarding confidential information and our clients’ privacy.

Given our WFH setup, please note that postal mail and courier deliveries will continue to be processed for now, but this may take longer than usual. If the pandemic situation worsens, our ability to process postal mail and courier deliveries may become much more challenging. As such, to the extent possible, we ask that you please take the following steps:

• Hold off on sending us any non-urgent physical mail.
• For business-critical mail, send us a scanned version, if possible.
• If it is necessary to send something to us by postal mail or courier, reach out to the recipient at MBHB by email so that they can provide an alternate address.
• Route all documents requiring signatures through an e-signature service such as DocuSign.
• For any payments that you would normally pay by physical check, wire those payments instead. Wire instructions are located at the bottom of our invoices, and can also be obtained by contacting our controller, James Bochenczak, at bochenczak@mbhb.com. If you incur any wiring fees, we would be happy to refund those upon request. If you cannot wire payments, please send your check to our lockbox at the following address:

McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP

24606 Network Place

Chicago, IL 60673-1246

Our legal practitioners will strive to keep you informed of critical updates that may impact your matters before the courts, the USPTO, and international patent, trademark and copyright authorities. As we receive updated information from the federal and local government agencies, we will continue to take steps to ensure that our obligations to our clients are met, regardless of the scope of any emergency. This includes ensuring that all of our employees have been cross-trained on client functions to avoid any interruption of client services.

We invite you to review the latest impact of the Coronavirus / COVID-19 pandemic on patent offices and federal courts on our award-winning Patent Docs weblog, which you can view here. We also encourage you to stay informed of the CDC’s best practices for Coronavirus / COVID-19, which you can view here. The CDC has also published guidance for businesses and employers, which you can view here.

Finally, we invite you to visit our new Coronavirus Update web page at https://www.mbhb.com/firm/coronavirus-update/ for MBHB updates related to Coronavirus / COVID-19.

Thank you for your continued trust in MBHB. Please do not hesitate to contact us if we may be of assistance to you in any way.

Sincerely,

Gavin O’Keefe

Managing Partner, MBHB