Legal Questions On the Coronavirus

Hi. This is Attorney Roy Oppenheim from the trenches. We just did a blog on how the coronavirus is going to create lots of new legal questions for all of us, questions that some of us have never even addressed before, because we’re dealing with issues that really are almost of a combination of a 9/11, the Great Recession, the great foreclosure crisis, with an overlay, possibly, of what happened during 1918, 1919, during the Spanish flu pandemic in the United States.

The good news is that we’re starting to hear that the virus actually does not like warm weather, that it actually, at around 80 or 85 or 86 degrees, will not be able to survive, and so we expect actually, certainly over the next several months, that people will find Florida to be a very attractive place to spend the winters. I mean it’s not a surprise that, almost a hundred years, people have been coming to Florida during the winter in order to get out of the cold, but they were also coming down because it was healthier and they could escape the normal flu or virus. And wow, this is not a normal flu and it’s not a normal virus. It has some of the characteristics of a virus and so being down here will certainly be better. But we’re gonna have lots and lots of legal issues, and I want to just throw some out at you for you to consider what we’re dealing with.

In some cases, we’re gonna have nursing homes that are going to get sued because they didn’t take proper precautions, obviously. And we’ve had that before during a hurricane when they didn’t remove people in time. We’ll see that again. We’re gonna see cruise lines that didn’t properly take proper precautions in terms of maintaining their facilities. Yeah, this cruise line now in California that had someone that had the virus on this ship on the previous cruise, and so they knew the virus was in the system, in the AC system, and they did not take proper precautions, and now you have all these people that are literally stranded and they are almost prisoners. It’s a form of false imprisonment action. And so you’re gonna have all kinds of crazy issues.

Now, we’re gonna have people who are gonna want to get their money back from cruise lines because it’s no longer safe. And you’re gonna have people who have insurance claims with third party insurers to ensure that they can get their money back. If they don’t file those policies correctly, they won’t get their money back. You’re gonna have cancellations from major conferences, the Ultra conference here in Miami has just be canceled. Who’s gonna pay for the tickets? Who’s gonna get paid back, you know, if you were gonna rent a booth or if you were a performer and you had a contract? I mean, the issues go on and on. And so those are the kinds of things we’re going to be dealing with.

Of course, you’re also going to be dealing with the questions of refinancing your mortgage. And right now, you have the lowest interest rates in the history of the United States. You’ll be talking about possible bankruptcies for small and mid-sized businesses that generally get their supplies and goods from China and they can’t do it now. They have nothing to sell. Or your you have a business that’s relying on tourism or the cruise industry, and you’re not getting the visit. You may be an Uber or a Lyft driver and your income is dropping. There are gonna be lots and lots of issues.

And ultimately, yes, there will be an increase in foreclosures again. And why? Because this is a cycle. It’s a cycle that we go through every 10, 12, 15 years, but this cycle is going to be a weird one, because it’s not just the slowing of the economy. It’s a slowing the economy with a health overlay, and so that health overlay and that scare overlay is going to slow down the economy. It’s going to slow down because consumers are going to slow it down as well as shippers and component part manufacturers in China. So it isn’t just like last time where the banks were the crime villain and they, of course, stopped lending because the economy seized up. In this particular case, the entire economy is seizing up because it’s happening from so many different angles.

We’re here. We think about this. We read about it. We talk about it. We blog about it. And we can help you navigate these waters. Roy Oppenheim from the trenches. Look forward to hearing from you. Thank you.