David J. Reis

Reis, an Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer partner, handles traditional labor matters for major Bay Area hospital clients, among other things. But the Covid-19 blitz was at another level of magnitude. "There was a big push to get ready for the expected onslaught and at the same time we saw many cancellations of elective procedures," he said. Costs became a major concern because the prep work was expensive at a time of significantly reduced revenues. "It was a double whammy."

The upshot was that Reis spent much effort on numerous employment counseling issues. He advised on the applicability of employer paid leave in the hospital setting under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act; on safety in the workplace; and how a pandemic emergency may affect the duty to bargain with labor unions about necessary changes in working conditions.

At one client, El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, childcare for staff became a pressing need. "State orders encouraged essential workers to show up, but there were also new rules telling employers to give time off to workers whose children were out of school," Reis said. "We found some flexibility in one executive order from Governor Newsom. And at El Camino, we created our own temporary childcare center across the street at a YMCA."

Those immediate concerns followed a much lengthier process for client PNY Technologies Inc., a New Jersey-based maker of flash memory cards and flash drives. It took Reis five years to collect attorney fees, costs and damages totaling $700,000 against a former employee who had sued over his termination but lost at trial. The sum included $500,000 that PNY had paid the man and his Silicon Valley engineering team before discharging them for failure to perform plus $150,000 in sanctions over the plaintiff's wage claim, which the court deemed frivolous.

"It turns out that collection agencies get half if they collect, so the client asked me to do it," Reis said. His efforts included a search that uncovered an old check in a personnel file that led to a bank account Reis could levy for part of the funds. Reis also filed a collection action in federal court so he could open discovery and learn enough to place liens on the man's real estate holdings. PNY Technologies Inc. v. Salhi, 3:18-mc-80125 (N.D. Cal., filed July 30, 2018).

In April 2020 Reis recovered for his client the final payment of $84,000. "We got every penny," Reis said. "In my 29 years of practice I've never collected anything close to this amount from an individual employee-plaintiff, but we turned the tables. My client felt extremely vindicated. And I figure that if things get slow, I could go into debt collection."

-- John Roemer