Story — continued from Page 32
The next day, while still in the hospital, she made a collect call to her father and asked her father to notify her work that she was hospitalized and would not be in. Her father called HR and, according to his testimony, told HR that his daughter was in the hospital. She remained in the hospital for
about four days. During her hospitaliza- tion, other than her father’s voicemail to HR, the plaintiff had no contact with the employer. After her discharge, the plain- tiff was enrolled in an intensive out- patient therapy program for about 10 more days. The day after her discharge from the hospital, the plaintiff called Benefit Solutions, which is an outside third party hired by the employer to be the initial point of contact for employees who seek to initiate leaves of absence.
Benefit Solutions was then supposed to route the plaintiff’s information to the employer’s internal Disability Leave Services (DLS) department. DLS would then send the plaintiff a leave of absence packet to get her leave protected. However, for whatever reason, that didn’t happen – either Benefit Solutions did not transmit the information to DLS or DLS received the information, but failed to send plaintiff her leave packet. Consequently, plaintiff was not granted leave of absence protection, and instead was fired for alleged “no call/no show.”
Using graphics to illustrate your themes and overcome your obstacles
•Visually presenting liability themes One defense was that the plaintiff did
not do enough to let her employer know
that she was in the hospital, needed leave, etc. The employer argued it never knew she was in the hospital, that she could have made many more efforts to let the company know she needed medical leave and that the company reasonably believed she had simply resigned. To argue this, the employer relied on our client’s super- visor’s testimony, which stated that in the meeting the day before her hospitaliza- tion, the plaintiff had said she hated the job and would look for another job else- where. To counter these attacks on the plain-
tiff’s failure to do more, we felt we need- ed to illustrate the importance of the medical-leave laws, to put her conduct in context and also to demonstrate how the employer’s complicated policies and
See Story, Page 36
berman@berbay.com
www.berbay.com 34— The Advocate Magazine APRIL 2011
berman@berbay.com
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