Amundsen Davis: 24/7 Legal Advice Provided By IPC to GPO Members

Samantha Pomeroy 0:36

Hello everyone and welcome to our discussion today. My name is Samantha Pomeroy, director of pharmacy services here at IPC and I’m happy to be joined today by Julie Proscia, partner at Amundsen, Davis law firm. Welcome.

Proscia, Julie 0:52

Hi, how are you doing today?
Thank you so much for having me.

Samantha Pomeroy 0:56

And Julie, while we hope our pharmacy members never need legal counsel, right, we do know that our pharmacy members are business owners and especially in today’s world things come, they come up and that is why we’ve partnered with you, Amundsen, Davis, to make sure our Members are in the best hands.

IPC pays the full retainer for our GPO members to have free access to the labor and employment frontline program that you offer, and we want to make our GPO members aware of this offering today.
Can you tell us about Amundsen, Davis and this program?

Proscia, Julie 1:34

Absolutely. That would be my pleasure. First and foremost, just thank you. Thank you so much for allowing us, the honor and the opportunity to partner with you to partner with your GPO members in the work that we’ve done with you over the past few years.
It has been an absolute privilege. So I’m just gonna start off and say thank you for that.

Samantha Pomeroy 1:52

Thank you.

Proscia, Julie 1:53

So who are we?
OK, so Amundsen, Davis, we’re a full service business, law firm. We are centered in the Midwest with our physical footprint being in the Midwest, but our clients are all over the country. And although we’re full service business, meaning that we have a retail practice group and a corporate services practice group and so on and so forth. I’m part of the labor and employment practice group.
I’ve had the privilege of being an attorney for about 20 years. A little over 20 years. Don’t let the colored hair fool you and have been working with Amundsen Davis since 2009 as a Learn employment practice group.

Samantha Pomeroy 2:27

Right.

Proscia, Julie 2:36

We represent members of management only, so that means it’s you guys, the business owners, your general managers we’re talking to you guys both small to mid size to large corporations on all of your labor and appointment issues. Our frontline program is our way to help you guys before it gets to litigation or anything where it gets, it gets large scale, it’s our preventative type of program.

Samantha Pomeroy 3:01

Great.

Proscia, Julie 3:05

It allows us to give you an opportunity to call, email, text pretty much everything except for carrier pigeon. One of our attorneys 24/7, we give you our cell phones. Our email, our contact office phone with top of the head legal questions. This isn’t like, hey, I have those 42 page contract they need you to draft, but more something along the lines of I have this question about HR related issues.

Samantha Pomeroy 3:28

Right.

Proscia, Julie 3:34

Help me out. Talk me through it. What do I need to do for this?

Samantha Pomeroy 3:38

OK. That’s amazing.

Proscia, Julie 3:41

Yeah, it is a really good way for individual employers to be able to get legal advice and not be scared to do it, because if you feel like you’re gonna get knocked for every time you talk to somebody and every second you don’t do it and then it becomes a big thing because you didn’t take the 15 minute call. This gives your GPO members the opportunity to hopefully either avoid completely litigation or to mitigate it substantially because you’ve already walked through the steps beforehand.

Samantha Pomeroy 4:10

Right. So can you tell us about some of the, you know, issues that could come up that you do offer counseling for in this program?

Proscia, Julie 4:21

Sure. So some of the typical issues that we talk about when we’re looking at counseling for this program are really related to employee issues. I mean, I think one of the most common ones that we get is about things like workers comp like my employee is out on workers comp or my employee is out on FMLA and they’re not giving us documents or they’re not talking to us.
What do I do? Or we walk employers through things like termination related issues, you know, this individualized performance related issues. What do I do? How do I terminate them? What are the risks for us to terminate them? And we also do things like we have a lot of template policies. I mean, a lot of things, you know, are crafted for individual organizations, right? It’s your policies for your vacation, just like, you know, IPC is a vacation policy that’s different than Amundsen.

Proscia, Julie 5:09

Davis, that’s different than XY and Z, but we have some standard policies like familiar ADA that we will give you at no charge as well that you guys could utilize and start to build on later on.

Samantha Pomeroy 5:22

OK. That’s that’s great. That’s a great resource.

Proscia, Julie 5:25

Yeah. So when you’re thinking about like what type of not just like what type of questions, what like what type of areas does labor and employment cover? Cause it’s a little bit of amorphous. Like when you’re saying it. Think of it first and foremost as HR matters and HR matters. Is anything that involves your employee, so I’m hiring somebody and they just tested positive for drugs or their background check came back XY and Z. Do I have to hire them? What do I need to do or I’ve got these performance related issues or we wanna fire them? Can we contest their unemployment? We’ve got a harassment complaint on the How do I handle it?
What do we need to do? We’ve got organization happening with union sniffing around. I think that in the past, you know, professional or retail type of establishments like pharmacies, you know like thought that would they were kind of exempt and while they started out with the bigger chains, they’re really moving down to the independent pharmacies as well too.

Samantha Pomeroy 6:21

Right.

Proscia, Julie 6:24

And it’s something that we as organizations kind of need to look out for.

Samantha Pomeroy 6:28

Right.

Proscia, Julie 6:28

I’m compensation issues staffing issues, so like you know, how do you know how do we a lot of states are moving towards pay transparency laws where you have to advertise what the cost of the position is and you have to hire within that. So, like, how does that work? You know, like a lot of times for most of us in the in this industry, people are physically there, but not all the times we do have some reward employees or we have employees like our general managers who will be going out on vacation someplace and they’re gonna be working in other states. How does that impact compensation?

Samantha Pomeroy 7:02

Right.

Proscia, Julie 7:04

So there’s just, there’s a lot of different areas that labor and employment cover that we are happy to assist you with.

Samantha Pomeroy 7:11

Thank you so much for that. I think a lot of our Members, you know, might not know that you know that we offer this to in its for our GPO members and but a lot of them don’t know that we that you all have this program and that we pay that full retainer for them to be able to access you the experts and you know to talk about these these different topics and it’s such a comfort that you all are there to you know to help guide us and direct us through these things because they do come up.

So I really appreciate you sitting down with me to discuss this today and just kind of a, you know, a quick overview of what the program is.

So tell them again how they can get in contact with you or in contact with Amundsen Davis to utilize this free program.

Proscia, Julie 7:57

Absolutely.
So we’ve got listed my email address and my phone number. That is my cell phone number, so it will ping to me wherever I am.
I check my email way too much it for some reason I’m unavailable because I’m in quarter at a client or whatever.

My assistant also is checking my email so she will put it to an individual. One of my colleagues, one of my fellow attorneys, or if you get a question or we get a question that I don’t know the answer to because I am human and every once in a while that occurs, you know we’ll, we’ll, we’ll set you up with one of the other attorneys and we will always tell you. Hey, so you know this is gonna go beyond the scope of the program, you know, now you’re looking, you’ve got, you’ve got a court case in, like, we can’t.

Samantha Pomeroy 8:42

Right.

Proscia, Julie 8:42

This isn’t what we would consider top of the legal top of the head, and then give you the opportunity to ascertain if you want to, you know, proceed forward with us or utilize a different resource. But what we want to make sure is that is GPO members.
You’re not scared to make the call or scared to make the email, and that you have that. And even if you know the answer, it’s fabulous to do the I cannot tell you how many times I’ll have a client be like, so I actually know the answer, but I just want to do a double check because this person is adamantly telling me what this is.

Samantha Pomeroy 9:18

Right. Right now, do you like this is great. Thank you so much. And you, you guys heard it. She said that you can email her, call her text her, you know, really 24/7 and she’ll get back to you. So we just wanted to make our GPO members aware of this valuable offering that we’ve brought to you and we really hope that you know that you take Julie up on her offer and utilize it. And when you have any any sort of issue that right that arouses that you know is is to deal with with labor and employment. So thank you, Julie, for joining us. Thank you to our pharmacy members for joining today. I’m listening to this and my contact is here on the screen as well. If you need to get in touch with me, thanks so much.

Proscia, Julie 10:01

Thank you.