On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. Almost every country around the globe has been affected by this outbreak and Cambodia is no different.

In the interests of combating this outbreak and protecting our staff and clients, we have established a few new measures with regard to our operating procedures – starting from 24th March until further notice.

Our firm has implemented Split/Rotating Working Groups and work-from-home policies in each practice group, including our Intellectual Property Practice Group, in order to ensure minimal disruption in providing services for you. Moreover, we are minimizing physical meetings and switching to online meetings, such as video calls or video conferences, so as to adhere to social distancing guidelines issued by the government. We note that recently, some ministries and institutions have allowed their officers to work from home in order to contain the spread of COVID-19.

These include the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Industrial, Science, Technology and Innovation who are the competent authorities dealing with Intellectual Property matters including Mark, Trademark, Patent, Industrial Design, Utility Model and so-on. However, some officers will remain on standby within their respective departments to provide public services as usual. Therefore, we assure you that the rights and interests of our on-going clients, including deadlines and other relevant prescribed dates remain as usual until further notice.

In this regard, we would like to reassure you that SokSiphana&associates remains in full operation and fully committed to continue providing high quality and timely legal services to all our clients. We will closely work with the government as usual without any disruption in this challenging period.

For more information about our office business continuity plan, please refer to this article.

For any information or concerns relating to IP or other legal matters in general, please do not hesitate to reach out to Khieu Mealy, Leakena Chhim or the SokSiphana&associates Partner or associate you usually deal with for assistance.