News/Events/Blogs

Weintraub Tobin is pleased to partner with BFBA, Chase Bank, and CVF Capital Partners to present Business Focus 2020: Helping your Business Survive and Thrive Through COVID-19.  This virtual and interactive event will address the “new normal” business landscape brought about by the economic and social changes of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Business Focus 2020 will feature a panel of professional advisors who have assisted small- and medium-sized businesses through the unprecedented challenges presented by the pandemic,

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Executive Order N-62-20—way back on May 6, 2020—which created a presumption that employees’ COVID-19-related illnesses were caused at work and therefore covered by workers’ compensation. That order covered COVID-19 infections from March 19, 2020 to July 5, 2020, at which time the order expired. To fill the void, on September 17, 2020, Gov. Newsom signed Senate Bill (“SB”) 1159 and Assembly Bill (“AB”) 685 into law.

Many businesses affected by COVID-19 and the related shelter-in-place orders are turning to their business interruption insurance policies in hope of finding relief. In general terms, a business interruption insurance policy replaces some or all of a business’s income when the business is forced to curtail or cease its operations as the result of a disaster. In the vast majority of cases, insurance companies have turned away COVID-related business interruption claims, claiming that these policies do not provide coverage for COVID-related claims.

On Thursday, Governor Newsom signed Senate Bill 1383, dramatically expanding the California Family Rights Act (“CFRA”), and the obligations it places on employers to provide leave to eligible employees. As a reminder, the CFRA is California’s leave statute, which authorizes eligible employees to take up a total of 12 weeks of unpaid job-protected leave during a 12-month period. While on leave, employees keep the same employer-paid health benefits they had while working.

Historically,

On September 11, 2020, the United States Department of Labor issued revised regulations governing the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA). The regulations implement the Emergency Paid Sick Leave Act (EPSLA) and Emergency Family and Medical Leave Expansion Act (EFMLEA) provisions of the FFCRA. The revised regulations were issued to address a decision from a federal court in New York that invalidated previous regulations concerning whether work must otherwise be available to employees seeking to use leave under EPSLA and EFMLEA and whether an employer must consent to intermittent leave.

While the effects of the COVID-19 health crisis have impacted daily life for months, the legal implications of this pandemic are just starting to develop. Unforeseen conditions often wreak havoc on existing contractual relationships, which are typically based on factual assumptions that, due to unexpected conditions like COVID-19, may no longer be appropriate. Many parties work through these circumstances through negotiation, reconciling their previous expectations and current conditions with their desired outcome, but these negotiations aren’t always successful.

On August 28, 2020, California introduced the Blueprint for a Safer Economy, also known as “California’s Plan for Reducing COVID-19 and Adjusting Permitted Sector Activities to Keep Californians Healthy and Safe.” This new Blueprint was devised to aid California residents as the state reopens in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Under this new plan, every county in California is assigned one of four tiers, based on the county’s test positivity and adjusted case rate.

On August 27, 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) published three new “Return to School” FAQs providing guidance for employers and employees as schools reopen across the country. Specifically, the DOL clarified when employees may be eligible for leave under the federal Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA).

As a reminder, under the FFCRA, job-protected leave must be provided to some employees in order to care for a child whose school or place of care is closed,

Josh Escovedo is quoted in a recent Sacramento Business Journal article titled Holding Back The Flood.  The article explains how commercial evictions and lawsuits are inevitable unless Congress acts soon to help businesses.

I think right now there’s a certain level of forced cooperation.

Read the full article on the Sacramento Business Journal website, here.

With 31% (or more) of American workers working from home as of April 2020, according to a survey cited by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and probably even more since then, most employers face important questions: what is the obligation to keep track of employees’ active work time and pay them for it?  On August 24, 2020, the United States Department of Labor (DOL) issued a “field assistance bulletin” to assist employers in understanding their obligations to monitor employees’ hours,