Joanmarie Dowling works with businesses and nonprofits every day on complex employment issues in her role as the managing member of Dowling Law, the labor and employment firm she started 10 years ago.
In the past two years, the business has moved into a new office on Wolf Road and started a new human resources division, Clarity HR Solutions. Much of that opportunity came from the changing dynamics of New York state and federal law.
Dowling Law focuses on labor and employment issues. How did the pandemic impact your work? Our work certainly was heavier. It’s difficult to be an employer in New York for a variety of reasons, and Covid is obviously an important one. But there are many other changes that have happened in the last two years. So I think what we’ve been trying to do is really help our clients navigate through that as efficiently as they can.
Tell me about some of the ways it’s become more difficult to be an employer in the last few years. With some of the employment laws that have been passed, for example, paid sick leave. In principle, paid sick leave is a great concept and we want to make sure that people when they are ill are staying home, especially during a pandemic. But what’s challenging about it is, because of all the rules and regulations that kind of go along with it, organizations that try to be more innovative find themselves pulling back. There are organizations that transitioned to unlimited PTO and then had to figure out how paid sick leave fits in....
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