By Celeste Bott

Law360 (May 28, 2020, 7:37 PM EDT ) A BigLaw firm and the NBA face lawsuits over allegedly delinquent rent payments, House Republicans are suing Speaker Nancy Pelosi over proxy voting amid the ongoing pandemic and Enterprise Rent-A-Car employees say the company should have warned them that mass layoffs were on the horizon. 

While courts across the country are altering procedures, restricting access and postponing certain cases to stem the spread of the coronavirus, the outbreak has also prompted a wave of new litigation across the country.

Here's a breakdown of some of the COVID-19-related cases from the past week.

Employment

Drivers for Uber and other app-based car services have sued the Empire State in federal court, alleging that the labor department has slow-walked their claims for emergency unemployment benefits during the coronavirus pandemic by treating them as independent contractors.

The suit, filed Monday in the Eastern District of New York, accused the state of violating the U.S. Constitution and the Social Security Act by making drivers jump through hoops to collect even after the state's highest court cleared their path to benefits. The drivers claim the state has delayed their access to unemployment by forcing them to prove their earnings rather than getting this data from their employers, as it does for workers it treats as employees.

A 34-year Enterprise Rent-A-Car employee laid off amid the novel coronavirus pandemic hit the company with a proposed class action in Florida federal court Wednesday, saying its failure to notify its workers of coming mass layoffs "had a devastating economic impact" and violated the WARN Act.

Longtime Enterprise rental agent Elva Benson says the car rental company "knew its business was suffering and, thus, knew a mass layoff was coming," yet it failed to give her and other former employees prior written notice of the coming layoffs, in violation of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.

Benson claims the company knew that demand for rental cars was declining amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, yet failed to issue warnings of possible layoffs to employees. She says the fact that her former employer furloughed her from her job at the Orlando International Airport in mid-March — more than a month before it terminated her on April 27 — indicates that Enterprise could reasonably have expected a mass layoff due to the pandemic.

And a former executive for an Illinois nursing home has claimed in state court that she was abruptly fired because she challenged the facility's COVID-19 response whenever it was inaccurate or disregarded regulatory guidance for safely navigating the pandemic.

Andrea Hinich said in her lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court that long-term care company Norwood Life Society Inc. fired her in retaliation for opposing, reporting and refusing to follow company directives on personal protective equipment, staffing and other issues she says were insufficient and violated her personal nursing obligations as well as federal and state regulations guiding health care professionals' response to the coronavirus.

Two former employees with the Visiting Nurse Association of Greater Philadelphia made similar claims Wednesday, launching a whistleblower suit in state court saying they were fired last month after raising concerns about the nonprofit's alleged failure to adequately protect staff and patients from the COVID-19 outbreak.

Real Estate

Jenner & Block LLP is in a fight with its Chicago landlord over how much in rent the firm must pay while its office space goes largely unused because of the coronavirus pandemic, with the landlord asking for more than $3.7 million.

Landlord Hart 353 North Clark LLC, an affiliate of global real estate investment management firm Heitman LLC, said in an Illinois state court lawsuit that Jenner & Block did not pay its rent for April and May and owes $3.72 million, plus late fees and interest. Jenner & Block leases approximately 416,297 square feet of office space in the downtown Chicago tower at 353 N. Clark St., the suit says.

The firm says it paid what its lease requires it to pay, saying its Chicago office includes a negotiated provision for rent abatement in the event of a situation, such as the global pandemic, that renders the firm unable to use and occupy the space for its intended purpose.

The NBA is also on the hook for April and May rent for its Fifth Avenue store, and now owes more than $1.2 million, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday in New York federal court.

535-545 Fee LLC, which has leased the retail space to NBA Media Ventures LLC since November 2014, said the organization had not paid its $625,000 monthly rent for April or May, despite an "absolute and unconditional obligation" to pay under its lease agreement.

Public Policy

House Republicans sued Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday, escalating their fight against a Democratic rule change earlier this month that lets lawmakers cast votes for up to 10 colleagues during the coronavirus pandemic.

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., led 20 other Republican representatives and four constituents in a lawsuit against the California Democrat and a pair of nonpartisan House officials in D.C. federal court, arguing that the Democratic rule change flouts the constitutional stipulation that "a majority of each [house] shall constitute a quorum to do business."

The House approved the rule change May 15 in a 217-189 vote that drew unanimous opposition from Republicans along with three Democratic defections. The divisive vote came after two weeks of bipartisan discussions failed to produce a deal, and Pelosi moved unilaterally.

Insurance

U.S. Specialty Insurance Co. is asking a Texas federal court to declare that an advisory firm can't ask for additional coverage beyond its $150 million limit over events canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying nothing in the policy entitles the firm to seek more money.

In a complaint filed Wednesday, USSI said Gartner Group Inc., a research and advisory company that organizes and stages events and conferences throughout the world, had had to cancel or postpone 50 of its 64 shows scheduled for 2020 and requested additional coverage from USSI for its losses. The $150 million is the total aggregate limit for the year, however, and USSI is not obligated to go beyond that, the insurer told the court.

According to the complaint, while in previous years Gartner had sought coverage for the full cost of all its events, over the last decade it had purchased less extensive coverage in anticipation that it would not experience a total loss. While that judgment was accurate until now, COVID-19 and the social distancing measures put in place to counter its spread have forced the company to cancel or postpone far more events than anticipated, with losses expected to exceed $400 million, according to the complaint.

Transportation

Three law firm groups fighting to lead a consolidated proposed securities class action accusing Norwegian Cruise Line of downplaying the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic continued to duke it out in Florida federal court Tuesday, with one urging the judge to select it and not conduct a "beauty contest" among the parties.

The suit alleges that Norwegian sales staff were urged to lie to prospective customers about the impact of the coronavirus outbreak, and that when news coverage detailed leaked internal memos, Norwegian's stock fell more than 50% in two days.

In their filings Tuesday, Labaton Sucharow LLP and Bernstein Liebhard LLP, representing investors William C. Perry and Brian Mark Eddy, who have the largest claimed loss at $267,807; Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP, representing Employer-Teamsters Local 175 & 505 Pension Trust Fund; and Stull Stull & Brody, representing investor Abraham Atachbarian, shot barbs at one another, with Perry and Eddy implying the Teamsters fund used its political connections to benefit its investments and the fund calling attention to Perry's guilty plea in a recent criminal case.

Banking

An asset-backed securitizer hit The Bancorp Bank with a suit in New York state court Monday, alleging that the bank refused to honor a "market disruption" clause when the coronavirus pandemic and ensuing financial volatility killed their $900 million mortgage loan securitization deal.

In late February, Cascade Funding LP — Series 6, an affiliate of Waterfall Asset Management LLC, agreed to buy and securitize a pool of $900 million in mortgage loan assets from Bancorp which would then be sold to investors by April 15, the suit says.

But when COVID-19 severely affected the market in late March, Cascade invoked the market disruption clause in their contract to shut down the deal and get its $12.5 million deposit refunded, according to the complaint.

Food & Beverage

Giant Eagle Inc. refused to accommodate a Pittsburgh-area woman's respiratory-related disability through its enforcement of a company policy requiring all shoppers to wear face masks due to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Pennsylvania federal court.

Kimberly Pletcher says she was forced to leave a Giant Eagle location in Elizabeth, Pennsylvania, at the end of April after employees at the grocery store told her that, despite her claims that she has a medical condition that makes it difficult for her to breathe, she was required to wear a face mask in order to shop.

And chicken producers facing allegations of a sweeping price-fixing conspiracy have pushed back on poultry buyers' bid to get some depositions back underway, arguing they can't adequately prepare witnesses while straining to brace a food supply chain rocked by the pandemic.

In a lengthy opposition Wednesday, Perdue, Tyson and other chicken producers urged the Illinois federal judge handling the four-year-old multidistrict litigation to reject buyers' effort to resume deposing their employees via videoconference. That is an unreasonable request when the entire industry is focused on performing vital duties during the unprecedented crisis, they said.

The producers argue that it is "neither reasonable nor feasible" to prepare their employees for legally binding testimony when they're grappling with the dramatic fluctuations in demand brought on by the novel coronavirus and the corresponding nationwide closures.

Securities

Sorrento Therapeutics Inc. was hit with a stock-drop suit on Tuesday over statements its CEO made to Fox News in mid-May that allegedly referred to a recent breakthrough in the company's COVID-19 treatment research as a "cure."

A Sorrento investor filed suit in California federal court, alleging that the biopharmaceutical company's stock was artificially inflated May 15 after it announced the discovery of an antibody that "demonstrated 100% inhibition of SARS-CoV-2 virus infection."

That same day, as Sorrento's stock price shot above its 12-month high, company founder and CEO Henry Ji "misleadingly referred to Sorrento's research as a 'cure'" in a statement to Fox News, the investor claims. But Ji insisted a week later that he had not called the breakthrough a cure in response to a report that called Sorrento's claims "sensational," "nonsense" and "too good to be true."

--Additional reporting by Lauraann Wood, Braden Campbell, Reenat Sinay, Matt Fair, Lauren Berg, Andrew Kragie, Dean Seal, Hannah Albarazi, Mike Curley and Rachel O'Brien. Editing by Peter Rozovsky.

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