Koray J. Bulut

As the head of Goodwin’s labor and employment practice in California, Bulut primarily litigates cases dealing with employee mobility, sexual harassment or trade secrets.

Over the years, he also has regularly advised clients about employment issues when they are involved in mergers and acquisitions. During the pandemic, however, the number and size of those deals shot up, he said.

“I don’t know if it was the infusion of cash through the stimulus bills, or private equity and other investors just had cash on hand to pick up companies that were distressed, but there is a huge volume of work,” Bulut said. “Some of those matters were pretty interesting.”

A perfect example, he said, was Amazon.com Inc.’s purchase last summer of self-driving vehicle start-up Zooks Inc. for more than $1.3 billion.

“It was a fast-moving deal, and there were some hiccups in the middle of that deal,” he said. Topping the list of hiccups were attempts by a competitor to poach Zooks employees, which would have diminished the value of the deal or even allowed Amazon to back out.

So at the same time he and his team were negotiating workforce transition provisions and employment agreements, “we were also sending letters to the competitor at issue instructing them to cease and desist, trying to help the client shore up potentially loose employees and also reassuring the buyer,” Bulut said.

A couple of months later, in a very different deal, they advised long-term Goodwin client Segment.io Inc. when it was acquired by Twilio Inc. for $3.2 billion in stock. Both companies develop business software. Bulut said one of their main tasks was assuring Twilio that Segment was not saddled with any significant employment issues.

He and his team also spent much of their time tracking ever-changing laws and regulations regarding the pandemic so that they could advise clients about them. And because Goodwin represents many early-stage technology companies, the lawyers were fielding questions from 15 to 20 clients every day, he said.

To stay current, Bulut assigned each of his attorneys to watch developments in particular topics or from certain municipalities. “We used to have bi-monthly meetings, but now we have bi-weekly meetings” to exchange information, he said. “So we’re really doing a lot of oversharing.”

He did also work on litigation, such as a nationwide wage-and-hour class action sought by employees of a company that sanitizes poultry processing plants. Pandemic restrictions made discovery difficult and kept his team from visiting the plants. Nonetheless, he was able to push the case and a related Private Attorneys General Act lawsuit in California to settlement. Chavez v. Stellar Management Group VII LLC, 3:19-cv-01353 (N.D. Cal, filed March 13, 2019).

Now that the U.S. is beginning to reopen, “I think we are due for a wave of litigation that has not yet percolated up,” Bulut said.

— Don DeBenedictis