Stefan Passantino, chair of Michael Best's Government Relations & Public Policy practice, speaks with Richard Levick, chairman of Levick, in this transcribed installment of the In House Warrior Podcast series.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Corporate Counsel Business Journal's daily podcast In House Warrior with host Richard Levick, chairman of LEVICK, a global crisis and litigation communications firm.
Richard Levick: Welcome to In House Warrior, the daily podcast for the Corporate Counsel Business Journal. I'm Richard Levick and with me today is Stefan Passantino, former Deputy White House Counsel. Stefan is chair of Michael Best's Government Relations & Public Policy practice, where he heads the firm's political law practice. Stefan, welcome to the show.
Stefan Passantino: Hello, Richard. Thank you for having me on. I hope you're doing well.
Levick: Thank you. These are challenging times for all of us. You have worked in the White House, you're incredibly insightful in terms of how Washington works, you know how things get done both on the legal side, but also the deep understanding of politics. What's keeping GCs up at night right now?
Passantino: Well, really for the GCs that we've been talking to, and I think that beyond that anecdotal experience throughout the country, they're really two different aspects of what's keeping GCs up at night versus the immediate, the short-term, the both legal and to a large extent business side of ensuring that whatever the company business operation is that they're associated with is going to have the means to get through this very, very challenging short-term process and be sure that they are alive and viable on the other side and able to operate. That is the immediate challenge that everyone is facing and candidly is taking 95 percent of the time and psychic energy for everyone just to make sure that they're through this process when we get to the other side. As I tell everyone, there will be another side. We are going to get through this.
The other side, the other component, however, is that GCs and business operators have got to start taking a view now towards how their business is going to operate in what will clearly be a new paradigm even once we get through the immediate impact of the virus and all of the social distancing. Everyone, especially organizations that have any public facing component or who have clients who have any public facing component, have to start now contemplating how they are going to be able to do business when they have operated previously on a model which has really been based on very tight human density.
If you want to run a restaurant, it's wonderful to say, "We're going to come back at 50 percent of our operation and we're going to be operating at a slower capacity," but restaurants only make money if they have full waiting rooms. Airlines only make money if they have a full density. Everyone who is public facing is public facing based on density and are going to have to make sure they're preparing now for a business model that's based on a government mandated and a cultural trend towards more social distancing.
It really is a two-part process. And candidly, the first part, the focus on the immediate is taking up about 95 percent of most people's time right now.
Levick: And of course the challenge would be the re-emergence and what that means in terms of the mid- and long-term.
Passantino: Exactly. That's right. That the reemergence, which obviously what has to get through the short-term, what has to get through the immediate, in order to even care about the emergence. But, for there to be an emergence, one has to be focusing on what that's going to look like and start preparing now for business models and ways of doing business that are going to have to contemplate more government mandated and cultural mandated physical distances.
Levick: Stefan, during 2008, 2009, we used to say on Wall Street at the center of the crisis, "Everyone's a capitalist on the way up, but a socialist on the way down." Now we see a need for both state and federal government and everyone is lined up and yet it's harder to get the attention of your state and federal government. What are you recommending to your clients?
Passantino: Yeah. You're absolutely right. I agree with you completely. Anytime when there is a challenge faced by the nation, and in recent history, one can look at the examples of 911, one can look at the 2008 recession, government assumes a much outside sense of importance in everyone's lives. It's appropriate and people are very accepting of that, but it's also an absolute fact that government at all levels, the federal level, the state level, the local municipal level, while they have the ability to move quickly when they have to, are absolutely not structured to engage at the retail level at the scope and the rapidity that's required under the current environment.
A very classic example is one has to look only at the CARES Act, the recent federal legislation in response to the COVID-19 crisis. The government acted with incredible speed and acted with a substantially large sufficient amount of dollars and an immediate outreach to solve the immediate problem. The government acted very quickly.
But what we've seen is that it's very easy sometimes for government to move quickly in big, broad gestures. It's very difficult for government then to translate those broad gestures into a retail experience. One only would have to look at the SBA loans that have been handed out under the CARES Act. It's been very, very challenging for the federal government. Not because the federal workers don't care deeply about the people that they're trying to serve. Not that everyone isn't on the same page with what relief they're trying to provide the American public. It's just very, very, very difficult to translate large, macro solutions to the retail level.
One of the things that we tell everyone, and one of the things that we've always been engaged in and are certainly engaged in now, is helping folks navigate the interaction with government at all levels. How you get things done, not just advocacy, but just how you interact with government. One of the pieces of advice that we tell everyone is you have to make sure you're understanding the right level as you're reaching it. It's very easy to assume that one should be reaching out to the highest level one can reach, the secretary of an agency or whatever else.
Frequently, the more effective approach is to find the person who is really at that retail level, but with enough authority to get things done. The undersecretary, the deputy who's in charge of a particular program, is generally the person who you can be persistent with, you can have contact with, and who really does have the ability to get things done. Knowing where to approach government and knowing that you're going to have to be persistent and you're going to have to be persistent at the right level is really the key towards helping the government navigate a function that it's really not geared to at this level.
Levick: Stefan, great advice as always. Stefan Passantino from Michael Best. I'm Richard Levick, In House Warrior for the Corporate Counsel Business Journal. See you tomorrow. Thanks so much.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to the Corporate Counsel Business Journal's In House Warrior with host Richard Levick.
Published October 12, 2020.
