Geelong Chamber gets back in business with law breakfast

GEELONG Chamber of Commerce and Harwood Andrews lawyers are once again welcoming the Geelong business community back to in-person events after moving online for much of 2020.

The chamber’s chief executive officer, Ben Flynn, said he was looking forward to the first event of the year – the much-anticipated Harwood Andrews Law Breakfast and its highly relevant ‘Business COVID Recovery’ theme.

“This is actually a pretty exciting event, it’s the law relating to COVID,” Mr Flynn said.

“What COVID has done is really throw up a lot grey areas and the team at Harwood Andrews are really going to try to explain the situation so that businesses don’t find themselves in a pickle.”

The all-star line-up includes principal lawyer Vittoria de Stefano, who will discuss why the COVID framework for commercial leases created significant uncertainty, the changing rules for landlords and tenants, as well as discussing ‘lessons learnt’ from COVID-19.
Ms De Stefano will be joined by industrial relations and OH&S lawyer Deepa Travers, and dispute resolution and litigation lawyer
Zac Griffiths.

More than 200 people are expected to attend the event, which came close to selling out within the first 48 hours of tickets going on sale.

“This shows us that the business community is really eager to get back to face-to-face events, but at the same time are also eager to learn more about some of these issues that all businesses face,” Mr Flynn said.

The Chamber is set to run a mixture of in-person and online events this year after enjoying huge success with its online events in 2020.

“Last year we hosted a whole range of online events that were unbelievably well attended so we are hoping to integrate the online and face-to-face this year so we are able to provide our members in the business community with even more,” Mr Flynn said.