The authors are leading a multinational effort to understand the effects of “hybrid” warfare on international commercial negotiation. The start‐up process is itself essentially a negotiation, among about forty individual practitioners and scholars with very diverse backgrounds, over whether and how they will work together. In a pandemic, a key risk is that the necessary cooperation and trust will be harder to build, particularly among professionals who are dealing with security‐sensitive issues and who have never met each other. This article discusses the current necessity of replacing the in‐person model for eliciting such cooperation which the authors had developed previously for large collaborative projects, and describes a “remote convening” replacement process.