When You First Call Our Employment Law Firm

When you call our New Jersey employment law firm, you will likely be greeted by Alice. She is a real human answering the telephone, and she is lovely. If our intake coordinator, who is usually Gianna, is available, you will be routed to speak to her. She is also a real human and lovely. Our law firm does not use any Artificial Intelligence (AI) answering services.

The Intake Process

Gianna will ask you for basic information such as your name and contact information, how you found our firm, and some general information about the employer you are calling about – such as the employer’s name, location, your title, dates of employment, and salary. Some people get nervous giving us this information, but you should rest assured that the information you provide to any attorney or staff member of our firm is protected by the attorney-client privilege. That means that we cannot (and will not) disclose that information without your permission. The requested information is also important because it allows our law firm to avoid conflicts of interest and enables our attorneys to make determinations about legal claims such as the economic value of a particular claim, which is largely based on compensation. 

Once Gianna has gotten all the basics down, she will ask you to explain why you are calling and will listen carefully to your story. She may occasionally politely interrupt you to ask you to explain things a bit further to ensure that we understand all of the important facts, to provide dates, identify people you are discussing, and/or gather other necessary information. Again, this entire conversation is protected by the attorney-client privilege. Gianna is typing while you’re speaking to make sure that all of the significant facts are given to a New Jersey employment attorney at our firm so sometimes she may ask you to slow down a bit. Given that we are all from New Jersey, we know how fast we can sometimes talk!

You should know that the attorneys at our law firm have invested a significant amount of time in both creating procedures that enable our intake coordinator to ask appropriate questions based on the information being given to them by each caller and training our intake coordinators to ensure that they know how to spot employment issues and ask targeted questions based on each individual caller’s situation.  So while the call may seem like a friendly call with a sympathetic person, it is very detailed and targeted discussion intended to figure out if you have a New Jersey employment legal claim with which we can assist. 

The Attorney Review

After Gianna is comfortable that she has gotten all the necessary information, she will provide the typed information she gathered along with the summation of your workplace concerns to an attorney at our firm for her or his review. Either Claudia or Chris will then review the information to determine if there is something that we can help you with. Sometimes, our attorneys will have additional questions or request that you provide certain documentation to us so you may have a second conversation with Gianna. Otherwise, if Claudia and/or Chris determine that this is a matter that we can assist with, we will ask Gianna to schedule a consultation with you. Regardless of whether we request more information, schedule a consultation or tell you that this is not a matter that we can help you with, you should know that either Claudia or Chris have reviewed all of the information provided to us by you.  In fact, Claudia or Chris carefully review the information provided by every person who calls our office and completes the intake process at our firm.

The Consultation

Claudia or Chris conduct every single consultation. That means that when you schedule a consultation with our law firm, you will meet with an actual lawyer for the duration of that consultation. While you may meet Alice, Gianna or other staff members while here, your actual consultation will be with a lawyer – not a paralegal, salesperson or other staff member. In fact, we don’t even employ salespeople because our experience and results speak for themselves so we do not need people to convince you to hire us! You will want to hire us because we are excellent at what we do.

Our consultations can occur in person, on Zoom or even on the phone – we let our clients choose what is most comfortable for them.

During the consultation, one of our New Jersey employment attorneys (either Claudia or Chris) will carefully listen to you, analyze the workplace situation that you are discussing, and provide appropriate legal advice to you. What that means is different for each person as some people just want us to review an employment contract, non-compete or other agreement, other individuals want advice on how to handle a situation, some others want to understand the strength, merits, and value of their legal claim, and yet others may be seeking some other type of guidance. Whatever your employment law needs, you should know that Claudia and Chris are experienced and well-regarded New Jersey employment attorneys. If you want to learn more about Claudia, you can read about her here Claudia A. Reis | New Jersey Employment Discrimination Lawyer Lenzo & Reis, LLC, or to learn more about Chris, you can click here Christopher P. Lenzo | New Jersey Employment Discrimination Lawyer Lenzo & Reis, LLC

Why Can’t I Talk to an Attorney When I First Call the Firm?

Our intake process is rather detailed and designed to get as much information as possible to enable our attorneys to make a determination about whether each caller has an employment legal claim that we can help with. As a result, each intake generally takes at least 20 minutes and often longer. Because of that, it is important to allocate resources appropriately. Having our intake coordinator spend the time necessary to gather all of the relevant facts and details, frees up our attorneys’ time to participate in consultations and represent existing clients to the absolute best of our attorneys’ abilities. Our process also makes sure that every person who calls our law firm to do intake receives a follow-up call from our office. Truth be told, if our attorneys got on the phone with every person who called and needed to follow-up with each one, they would not have enough time to do the legal work necessary to properly represent our law firm clients. Because Claudia and Chris are committed to providing the best representation we possibly can to each of our clients, our attorneys generally do not talk to or meet with potential clients until the consultation stage.

What happens when a New Jersey candidate for employment is denied a job just because he or she tested positive for the legal use of cannabis? That’s been a question on the minds of employment lawyers ever since the legislature legalized cannabis use. That is because while the Cannabis Regulatory, Enforcement Assistance, and Market Modernization Act (“CREAMMA” or the “Act”) makes it unlawful to fire, refuse to hire or take other adverse actions against employees solely on the basis of a positive test for cannabis, N.J.S.A. 24:6I-52(a)(1), the Act does not explicitly allow employees to file suit if they have been fired just for testing positive for cannabis. Instead, the only penalties are civil monetary penalties that can be imposed against employers. N.J.S.A.34:6b-21. Such penalties, however, do nothing to help employees who have been fired from stable jobs for doing nothing more than engaging in legal activities while not working.

On May 26, 2026, the Appellate Division gave hope to New Jersey employees when it decided Sanders v. The Levari Group, LLC. 2026 WL 1532963 (App. Div., May 26, 2026). In that case, a candidate for employment was required to undergo a drug test as part of the employer’s standard hiring process. The test results came back positive for cannabis use and the candidate admitted to having used cannabis recreationally within the past 30 days although she denied using cannabis or being under its influence on the day of the drug test. The defendant-employer revoked the candidate’s offer of employment after she declined to retake a drug test at her own expense within the week. Ultimately, that candidate filed suit asserting a claim under CREAMMA for an unlawful failure to hire as well as a claim for wrongful termination in violation of New Jersey’s public policy — what lawyers generally refer to as a Pierce claim. The trial court dismissed the plaintiff’s Complaint because: (1) the Legislature did not specifically allow candidates for employment to sue under the Act if their offer of employment was revoked just because they tested positive for cannabis, and (2) the candidate for employment had not yet been employed at the time that her offer of employment was revoked and, therefore, she could not bring a wrongful termination claim in violation of public policy.

The Appellate Division recognized that the Act does not expressly allow candidates for employment to sue if their offer is revoked (or employees to sue for being fired for that matter), but took the analysis one step further by pointing out that courts can recognize when the legislature intended to implicitly create a private causes of action (a way to pursue a lawsuit) even if the legislature did not explicitly include a mechanism for doing so in the statute. Analyzing factors articulated by the Supreme Court of the United States in Cort v. Ash, 422 U.S. 66 (1975), to determine whether a legislature implicitly created a way to file suit, the Appellate Division concluded that (1) the plaintiff-candidate for employment was intended to benefit from CREAMMA, (2) the New Jersey Legislature intended to create a private right of action for people like the plaintiff given that CREAMMA includes “‘rights-creating language’” (meaning candidates for employment cannot be denied employment and employees cannot be fired just because they tested positive for cannabis) but the Act has no way to enforce that right, and (3) a private right of action (providing candidates for employment and employees with a way to sue) is consistent with the purpose of CREAMMA – to prevent the revocation of employment offers as well as to prevent firings simply because of a positive drug screen for cannabis.

That is how the Appellate Division concluded that the legislature intended CREAMMA to provide a way by which candidates denied employment and employees fired solely because of positive drug screen could sue to enforce the Act’s anti-discrimination provision. As a result, the Appellate Division reversed the trial court’s dismissal of the plaintiff’s claim for a violation of CREAMMA. The Appellate Division, however, agreed with the trial court’s decision to dismiss the wrongful termination public policy count of the plaintiff’s Complaint because such claims only apply when there is a wrongful discharge/unlawful firing and the plaintiff was never an employee – meaning, wrongful discharge claims do not apply when there is a failure to hire.

So what does this mean for New Jersey employees who were fired for testing positive for cannabis use? Well, it means that New Jersey employees can sue employers who fire them for simply testing positive under the Act as long as those employees do not fall into one of the very limited exceptions to CREAMMA. The claims employees can bring are a statutory discrimination claim under CREAMMA and an unlawful firing/wrongful discharge in violation of public policy of New Jersey (a Pierce claim).

As of July 17, 2026, the New Jersey Family Leave Act (“NJFLA”) just got better.

Under the NJFLA, eligible employees are legally entitled to take 12 weeks of job-protected leave in a 24-month period to care for a new child in your family or a seriously sick family member. While previously only employees who worked for employers with 30 or more employees worldwide were entitled to take New Jersey Family Leave, the recent amendments cut that number in half. So now, employees are entitled to family leave as long as their employers employed at least 15 employees worldwide during 20 or more workweeks in the current or immediately preceding calendar year. That means that many more New Jersey employees working for small employers will now be entitled to job-protected family leave under the NJFLA.

But those are not the only changes! For example, prior to the current changes employees seeking to take NJFLA leave were required to have worked for their employer for at least 12 months and have worked at least 1,000 hours during that period of time. Now, however, employees are entitled to leave if they worked at least 3 months and worked 250 hours during the past 12 months. This change means that relatively newly hired employees and many more part-time employees will be entitled to family leave if they need it.

The NJFLA always provided for job-protected leave – meaning that employees returning from NJFLA leave were entitled to be returned to the same or a substantially similar position. The recent amendments expand that protection by making clear that covered individuals taking temporary disability benefits (TDB) or family temporary disability leave benefits (known as family leave insurance (FLI)) are also entitled to be returned to their same or substantially similar positions in terms of seniority, status, employment benefits, pay, and other terms and conditions of employment even if they are not eligible for NJFLA leave. Also, employees returning from leave must be treated the same as other employees for purposes of any layoff or recall system, including those under union collective bargaining agreements.

The last amendment to the NJFLA provides that employees who are eligible for both earned sick leave and either temporary disability benefits or family leave insurance benefits have the option of either using the earned sick leave or temporary disability/family leave insurance benefits and may choose the order in which the different types of leave are taken although employees cannot take more than one kind of paid leave simultaneously during any period of time.

For more information about the FLA, please visit FLA Basics | New Jersey Employment Law Lawyers Lenzo & Reis, LLC

You can find the NJLA amendments here.

In a huge victory to the LGBTQ community and its advocates, the Supreme Court of the United States (the Court or SCOTUS) made clear that it is unlawful for employers to fire employees simply because they are gay or transgender under Title VII. The Court reached that conclusion by finding that discrimination against gay or transgender employees necessarily implicates sex and sex discrimination is barred by Title VII. Specifically, the Court emphasized that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”

The SCOTUS decision in Bostock v. Clayton County , which was written by Justice Gorsuch, provides various examples to explain how discrimination against gay and transgender employees is unlawful sex discrimination. One such example is that if two employees, one a man and woman, are both attracted to men but only the male employee is fired for that attraction, that male employee would have been discriminated against because of his sex. Why? Well, because, in the simplest terms, if he were a woman, he wouldn’t have been fired. Similarly, if an employer fires an employee who now identifies as a woman despite having been assigned the gender of male at birth while that employer does not fire an employee who was identified at birth as well as now as a woman, the employer would be penalizing “a person identified as male at birth for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee identified as female at birth.” The last example provided by the Court involves an employer who invites employees’ spouses to the annual holiday party. Two employees bring their female spouse named Susan but one of those employees is a man while the other is a woman. If the employer fires the female employee because she brought her wife Susan to the party but not the male employee for bringing his wife Susan, the employer would be treating the two employees differently on the basis of their sex. In each of the examples, “the individual employee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role in the discharge decision.”

Although a significant victory for the LGBTQ community, this case will probably not be the last word on the workplace rights of gay, transgender, and other straight non-cis employees. That is because at the very end of the decision, Judge Gorsuch made clear that the decision does not address the interaction of employers’ religious convictions or free speech rights and Title VII nor does it interpret the impact of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 on Title VII.

What impact will this decision have on New Jersey employees? Probably not much because our legislature made it illegal to discriminate against gay employees in 1991 and transgender employees in 2006 when sexual orientation and gender identity and expression were added to the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination’s list of protected characteristics.

While most employers can’t wait to get their employees back to work, some unscrupulous employers are using COVID as an excuse to lay-off New Jersey employees on a discriminatory and/or retaliatory basis. Workplace discrimination and retaliation are against the law and COVID is no excuse for unlawful employment decisions.

So how are some employers using COVID as an excuse to make discriminatory and/or retaliatory employment decisions? We have learned of so many different ways that this is being done.

Some are targeting people in protected classes for lay-offs – meaning that they are making decisions about who to lay-off on the basis of age, race, gender, disability, pregnancy, people who took legally protected leave or FMLA, sexual orientation, etc. Whether in the middle of a pandemic or not, that is unlawful workplace discrimination. In fact, we have gotten calls from laid-off employees whose employers let go of many of the older workers – the people who tend to make more money or cost more in insurance. When employment decisions disproportionately affect a certain protected class of workers – like older workers – that is unlawful discrimination.

Other employers are laying off employees who have complained about discrimination or sexual harassment and/or blew the whistle on illegal workplace conduct. Employers who target for a lay-off employees who have complained about discrimination, harassment, and/or unlawful workplace conduct are violating the law by engaging in illegal retaliation.

Other ways that we have seen employers use COVID as an excuse is that they are returning all of their employees to work but slashing the pay of only some employees in a discriminatory and/or retaliatory manner. What does that look like? Well, it looks like an employer returning its employees to work but telling only a certain group of employees – like older workers, women, or workers with accommodations – that their pay is being cut while not cutting the pay of other employees.

Yet other employers are allowing some workers to keep working from home while forcing other employees in similar jobs to return to work – sometimes under dangerous circumstances. Often the workers being forced to return to work under those circumstances are being subjected to age discrimination, race discrimination, gender discrimination, disability discrimination, pregnancy discrimination and/or retaliation for taking leave and or whistleblower retaliation.

Believe it or not, we even know of some employers who are discriminating and/or retaliating against employees by calling back workers but refusing to allow certain groups of employees to return to work. Often, those employees that are not allowed to return to work are older workers, women, pregnant women, and/or workers who took FMLA leave but have been cleared to return to work. That is unlawful discrimination, too.

What can you do about it if you feel that your employer is using COVID as an excuse? You can call Claudia Reis and Chris Lenzo at Lenzo & Reis, LLC to see how we can put an end to this discrimination and retaliation.

Claudia’s Corner is brought to you by Claudia A. Reis, a New Jersey employment attorney with the law firm of Lenzo & Reis, LLC.

So what are New Jersey employees suffering from anxiety and/or depression supposed to do if they are called back to work and told they have to go into their workplaces? Must employees choose between returning to work at the risk of their emotional well-being and facing financial ruin because they will be fired and denied unemployment if anxiety prevents them from returning to work? No, those two terrible choices may not be the only choices.

Are There any Options for Employees too Anxious to Return to Work?

Diagnosed anxiety is a disability under New Jersey law that employers must reasonably accommodate as long as the accommodation doesn’t create an undue hardship for the particular employer. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to accommodations, the law recognizes that remote working (allowing employees to work-from-home) can be one type of accommodation that is reasonable.

Before Covid, a lot of employers took the position that remote working just wasn’t possible or imposed an undue hardship on them. But Coronavirus has shown that working-from-home is possible for most employees. Because of this, it will be very difficult for employers who have had their employees work from home since mid-March to suddenly take the position that working remotely is either not possible or imposes an undue hardship. But that doesn’t mean that employers are required to allow remote working if there are other reasonable ways to accommodate anxiety.

What Should You Do?

The process to request accommodations can be tricky. You should get documentation of your disorder and need for an accommodation and provide that your employer. That triggers your employer’s obligation to engage in the interactive process, which is a fancy way of saying that they have to discuss with you different options that may work as an accommodation for you. In most cases, that may provide you with the accommodations you need especially in a post-Covid world where remote working is obviously doable. If your employer refuses to accommodate you or refuses to engage in the interactive process, you should immediately contact Claudia Reis and Chris Lenzo, New Jersey employment lawyers to help guide you through the process or talk to your employer on your behalf so that you don’t have to choose between your health and financial stability.

Claudia’s Corner is brought to you by Claudia Reis, your New Jersey employment attorney who only represents workers.