Keeping restaurants afloat amid lockdowns
2 min
"We had to manage 5,000 legal proceedings in a very short space of time.”— Sophie Masset
A Story by Sophie Masset, Claims Technical Director, AXA France
How long have you been at AXA?
I’ve actually been part of the AXA story since the beginning! This year I am also celebrating my 40 years at AXA - though when I started, it was not called AXA. And the reason I have stayed all these years is because I have had such a rich career here. I have not been bored for one moment! What I do is extremely diverse. I find it fascinating because I’ve worked across different sectors and different situations, and even now in the accident and damage department, no day is ever the same.
“It was only after the end of the lockdown period that we realised what we had achieved.”
What’s one event that has stayed with you?
March 2020, which is when the French economy was abruptly brought to a halt. It felt like the decision had been made overnight. We received a flood of calls and emails from our clients, asking what they should do, whether we would help them while their business was shuttered. I remember the photos that restaurant owners were taking of all of the food that they suddenly had to throw out because they wouldn’t have customers anymore.
How did work change for you?
We had to manage 5,000 legal proceedings in a very short space of time. I think at the time we got 150 court summonses in about three days. To be honest, it was exhilarating, in the sense that it was incredibly interesting in legal terms. Restaurants all over France were coming to us to try to settle claims, but our contracts with them didn’t cover a nationwide pandemic.
How did you cope with the deluge of cases?
I created a team that worked solely on this. We had weekly meetings and a team of ten lawyers that I later expanded to 20, and we worked our way through the caseload. We had never worked on such a massive scale before and in such a small timeframe. Then in the summer of 2020 we put in place our first transactional measure with some clients, even those who had not opened a lawsuit. It was very successful, and meant we could focus on the cases in which we hadn’t yet found an agreement. It took until December 2022 for the highest court in France to come to a judgement and agree with us.
What did you learn from this?
Several things. First, that we are capable of working in an emergency situation when under a lot of pressure. The workload did not let up, for months and months. And my team was extremely organised and extremely hard-working. We realised that we could trust each other. AXA is very resilient - yes, we lost some contracts during this period, but we came out on top, even during a crisis.
