Stanford Law School, William H. Neukom Building

Stanford Law School has placed all those COVID-19 memos that have been flooding in-house lawyers' inboxes into a free, searchable database that launched Thursday.

Created with general counsel in mind, the COVID-19 Memo Database puts more than 4,000 memoranda discussing legal, regulatory, accounting and governance issues wrought by the coronavirus at the legal department's fingertips.

"Here is a wealth of knowledgeable information coming from the most sophisticated law firms in the world to inform your thinking without your picking up the phone and paying a dime," said law and business professor Joseph Grundfest, who is also a senior faculty member at the Rock Center on Corporate Governance.

The database, believed to be unique, is a keyword-searchable index that lists sources and titles, with links to the original memos. Sources include law firms, the Big Four auditing firms and other business experts. It was developed and is being maintained and updated by the Rock Center and Cornerstone Research.

"Say you are looking at a bunch of contracts and wondering about force majeure provisions," Grundfest explained to Corporate Counsel. "You go to this website, type in 'force majeure,' and you get at least 69 memos by title." He said by scanning the titles, and their sources, a general counsel can quickly see which ones to read.

"Look," Grundfest said as he scrolled through the index, "there's Gibson, Dunn [& Crutcher] on force majeure in oil and gas leases; Wilmer Hale [Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr] on what to do going forward; White & Case on the supply chain; Hogan Lovells on information technology."

The memo topics range from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, with over 250 titles to business interruption issues with at least 18 titles. Other topics include tax matters, workplace issues, securities regulation, antitrust, insurance, international trade and more. Dozens of others deal with issues arising in specific countries such as China, the European Union, France, Germany and Great Britain.

"We are drowning in COVID-19 information," Grundfest said. "I see literally dozens of terrific memoranda every day from high-quality law firms, but have no way of quickly finding the most recent information specific to a problem I am researching. This database is a practical solution to a real-world problem that can also serve as a great resource for scholars and educators."

Cornerstone Research vice president Alexander "Sasha" Aganin, said in a statement, "As we collectively strive to address the evolving coronavirus crisis, it is becoming clear that COVID-19 will have profound, far-reaching implications. In joining our firm's capabilities with the reach and impact of Stanford Law School, we hope to provide a dynamic source of information that will be useful to legal and business enterprises as well as the broader community at large."

Grundfest said he came up with the idea when law firms began flooding his email with COVID-19 client memos. With the help of his administrative assistant and one undergraduate student, they set up a separate inbox to receive all COVID-19 memos from Am Law's top 20 law firms in revenue or profits per partner. They also added as sources the Big Four accounting firms as well as business experts affiliated with the Rock Center.

"Cornerstone set up the internet infrastructure and we designed the content workflow to populate the database," he said. The entire project was built in a week. It is updated with new memos three times a week.

The idea came to Grundfest because of his own needs. General counsel and other executives sometimes call him for legal advice in these complex times, he explained, and he also is chair of the audit committee at KKR & Co. Inc.

"When someone calls me with a question," he said, "I sometimes learn a great deal by reading four memos from four different law firms with different insights. I can send them the links."

The law firms don't mind, he said, because the database is furnishing only an index with links and not the full text, which appears only on the firm's website.

"This is the quickest and most efficient way to get smart about an issue, to get answers to questions without running up a big legal bill," Grundfest said. "The memos are a wonderful resource."