Events

Barbara T. O’Toole serves as panelist in BBA webinar on enforcing contracts during a pandemic

Barbara T. O’Toole, associate in the firm’s Litigation Department, spoke during the Boston Bar Association’s (BBA) webinar, Enforcing Contracts During A Pandemic: Surveying the Initial Judicial Response to Covid-19 Contract Defenses, on December 1, 2020.

Ever since COVID-19 began spreading across the United States in early 2020, parties to a variety of business and commercial contracts have been testing the limits of their force majeure clauses, as well as the related common law defenses of impossibility, impracticability, and frustration of purpose, to try to excuse their contractual performance. During the webinar, Barbara and fellow panelists discussed the initial court decisions in Massachusetts, and across the country, to evaluate the applicability and validity of these contract defenses to Covid-19 and its regulatory fallout.