As France redirects its focus away from containing the health crisis of COVID-19 and toward managing the economic crisis caused by the pandemic, law firms are also pivoting to refocus their client advice for the post-crisis era—and many of them are applying the lessons to their own operations as well, managing partners say.

Gide, a leading French firm, has launched "Gide Rebound," an extension of the firm's COVID task force team approach "to work on the consequences of the crisis on corporate life" with clients, according to a statement from the firm.

Two other elite French firms, De Pardieu Brocas Maffei and Jeantet, are also retooling their COVID-19 task forces to include a focus on practice areas that will need more attention in the post-crisis era.

Dentons is targeting the general counsel market in France with its "New Dynamic Toolkit," a group of products and services to help GCs and in-house legal teams "inform their strategic planning and help them navigate the unknown," according to the firm.

In constructing their new offerings, firms are looking at everything from big-picture management philosophy to granular, day-to-day issues, according to law-firm partners involved in the efforts.

"The crisis didn't change everything, but it changed a lot," said Catherine Saint Geniest, co-managing partner of Jeantet. "Now it's normal that everyone wants to speed up and catch up."

The Dentons package for in-house counsel includes advice on "quick pivots," how to scenario-plan for the months ahead, and lessons learned from South Korea, which was early to contain and emerge from its COVID-19 crisis.

Gide Rebound advertises a two-pronged approach to post-crisis management: short-term issues directly related to the COVID-19 crisis, such as health and liability challenges, and structural and long-term changes resulting from the crisis, including the importance of digitalization, corporate social responsibility and potential threats to globalization.

"In the 'new normal,' companies are going to have to integrate deep transformations," said Franck Guiader, head of innovation at Gide. "Some of that transition has already started. Rebound is helping Gide to organize so that it can respond to clients on these broader themes."

A key reason for the pivot is that what clients, and the firms themselves, needed at the beginning of the crisis is very different from what they need now, managing partners told Law.com International.

De Pardieu started carrying the equivalent of a news feed on its website in February, when the French government started issuing new decrees and guidance every day on everything from sick leave to social distancing.

"We were responding urgently to a real demand," said Emmanuel Fatôme, the firm's managing partner. "Our clients needed to understand the government decisions as they were made, and we needed to follow them very closely ourselves to give our clients the best advice."

Now that work is beginning to resume in offices across France, De Pardieu is shifting to a tighter focus on finance and, in particular, government-guaranteed bank loans, known by the French acronym PGEs (for prêts garantis par l'Etat). The program has already backed €85 billion in aid for troubled businesses and the government expects it to expand eventually to €100 billion.

"This is an important element of France's recovery, and an important practice area for us," Fatôme said.

At Jeantet, the firm's initial COVID response also revolved around communications—in this case, producing communiqués and webinars at a fast clip, all of them available to the public.

As the French economy emerges from lockdown, Jeantet is now working on what it calls a "report card": lessons about managing through crisis that are applicable after the crisis has passed, and new areas that will require closer client attention, such as the balance between litigation vs. mediation and arbitration.

"One thing we learned during the lockdown is that everyone has a very different experience of working under these conditions," Saint Geniest said. "It's important to be flexible in managing your workforce, to really listen."

Stéphane Puel, managing partner of Gide, added that the very experience of creating a task force to work on the crisis and its aftermath was useful to the firm as well as to clients.

"At a very difficult, destabilizing time, it was important to feel that we were together and working on something bigger than ourselves," he said. "Like any enterprise."