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David Helbraun is the Founding Partner and Chairman of Helbraun Levey. Prior to founding the firm in 2005, David opened and owned Pyramid Coffee Company, a multi-unit coffee bar/cafe company based in Manhattan. He is a lifelong entrepreneur who has been running successful businesses in New York City for years.

About 10 days ago, Lee Jacobs got reports from six restaurant clients who had fully vaccinated workers that had recently fallen ill with COVID-19. “It has gone from once every couple of days to multiple times per day, and then it peaked,” says Jacobs, an attorney with New York hospitality law firm, Helbraun Levey.

Lawyers at Helbraun & Levey LLP say they’re on a mission to stop food-delivery behemoths like Grubhub and DoorDash from taking too big a bite out of Big Apple restaurants, and…

The filing seeks declaratory and injunctive relief, several types of damages, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, and an award of attorneys’ fees and costs. The plaintiff is represented by Helbraun & Levey LLP.

It is “a blatant violation of the law,” said Lee N. Jacobs, an attorney who represents Micheli & Shel. He said other businesses plan to join the suit if it becomes a class action. The case was filed earlier this week in federal court in Manhattan.

Lee Jacobs of Helbraun & Levey LLP, one of the attorneys representing the proposed class, told Law360 on Monday that litigation is necessary to stop the delivery apps’ alleged violations.

“These companies continue to either charge more than 20% or are not in compliance with the law in various ways, and they still continue to make money off the backs of our clients,” Jacobs said. “The only way to correct this behavior is to band together in a suit like this to demand change from these companies”

Legal experts say that absent such a law, public establishments are allowed to require proof of vaccination for entry. “If you are a bar or club you can legally discriminate on the basis of someone’s vaccination status, but the law requires you to give reasonable accommodation to those persons who have a medical disability or sincerely held religious beliefs,” said Lee Jacobs, a partner at Helbraun Levey, a law firm that represents restaurants, bars and hotels.

While the legality of vaccination mandates in the workplace is clear cut (if bound in legal jargon) the debate over whether a business should go down this route is more complicated. This very topic is one that Lee Jacobs, a partner at Helbraun Levey, a firm that specializes in legal services for bars, restaurants, and hotels, has been discussing with his clients.

David Helbraun, a founding partner of Helbraun Levey, said his firm has worked on hundreds of lease-exit negotiations in the past year — a huge increase from the handful of cases they handled pre-pandemic. “It always costs the restaurant owner more than they want to pay, but it’s always less than they actually owe,” Helbraun says. “That’s where the negotiation comes in.”

David Helbraun was featured on an episode of “From Kitchen To Cause,” to talk about one of the most urgent issues today: rent. “David is the Founding Partner and Chairman of one of the largest law firms focused exclusively on hospitality, Helbraun Levey. In this episode, David shares how business owners are working with landlords to renegotiate rent during this difficult time.”

“My restaurant clients who are downtown in Lower Manhattan are struggling more than most, as much as Midtown clients,” said David Helbraun, founding partner and chairman at Helbraun Levey, a New York City-based hospitality law firm, who says the slow, choppy stimulus talks in Washington, D.C., have left the sector in even more dire straits. 

The real trouble, Helbraun says, are the mid-size property owners with a few dozen buildings. He calls them the shark pool; “cultivating a reputation for being tough and not budging is how they’ve survived in the past.”

For small-scale restaurateurs facing existential challenges, tipping policy is “not high on the list” of priorities, said David Helbraun, a lawyer in Manhattan whose firm represents more than 1,000 restaurants.

Helbraun said that for all the supposed good will, most landlords “are still wait-and-see.”

Upper East Side landlord sues Fig & Olive founder personally for unpaid rent

“Landlords started out as pitbulls, and they’ve turned into poodles,” said David Helbraun, founding partner at Helbraun Levey

David Helbraun, founder of Helbraun Levey, a law firm that represents restaurants and bars, said the City Council measure would give tenants leverage in negotiations with landlords about rent payments. He said tenants could walk away from leases more easily, knowing that they won’t face crippling legal repercussions.

“The initial inaction has left gaping holes for the restaurant industry that need to be plugged,” said Lee Jacobs, partner at New York-based hospitality firm Helbraun & Levey. “The stimulus bill is a good start, it takes care of employees that have already applied for unemployment; it takes care of the businesses and restaurants that made the decision to weather the storm. But it does nothing for those restaurants that were forced to close or terminate their staff before the government acted.”

“We’re sitting around in an imaginary line hoping there’s money to fund all of us,” said David Helbraun, founding partner at Helbraun Levey, a law firm that represents more than 1,000 clients in New York City’s hospitality industry.

“They’re some of the toughest people you’ll ever meet, and I’ve never seen my clients so much on the edge of their seat and nervous,” Helbraun said

Lawyer David Helbraun, whose firm represents nearly 1,000 restaurants, advises clients not to rush into landlord talks yet.“Everyone says they want to make a deal. We say to them, ‘How can you do that until you know what the new landscape will be?’”

The Hospitality Industry Is Demanding Next Steps From State And Local Governments That Mandate Ever-Increasing Restrictions But Offer No Relief.

“He [Death & Co owner Dave Kaplan] didn’t need to seek advice elsewhere to come to the moral conclusion, but he’s been grateful for the business attorneys at New York firm Helbraun Levey, who have proven themselves invaluable in other ways, publishing a daily newsletter with the latest guidance and distributing it to their clients free of charge.”

Lawyer David Helbraun, whose firm Helbraun Levey has 1,000 restaurant clients, believes that the scene may return to normal once confidence sets in that the pandemic is truly over.

And if a vaccine is developed? “It will be the Roaring ’20s again,” says Helbraun.

More Than Anything, Rent Threatens Restaurants In Coronavirus-Hit Areas Of The Country

“Helbraun & Levey LLP partner Lee Jacobs said most landlords are accommodating, but larger institutional landlords with enough cash to hold out “can outlive having empty retail space.”

Advice From Former Federal Prosecutors

“Rent is never a suggestion,” says Lee Jacobs, a partner in Helbraun & Levey LLP, which specializes in the restaurant industry. “My fear is that hundreds of thousands of unsophisticated small-business owners think that because we’re in a pause, or a shelter-in-place, that that excuses them from paying rent. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.”

“The goal of PPP is to keep people on payroll and avoid having them go onto unemployment insurance. But since the government was so late in debating and then passing the bill, when it finally went into effect, restaurants were already closed,” says Lee Jacobs, partner at the law firm Helbraun Levey and chair of the firm’s employment practices group.

“Lee N. Jacobs of Helbraun Levey, a premier law firm in NYC for the hospitality industry. leading the Firm’s response to the COV/0-19 crisis and has been working day and night with our clients to help our clients properly cease operations, pivot to delivery/takeout, prepare to withstand the long shutdown, and being primed to thrive once the pause ends”

At a time of unprecedented danger and tumult for the restaurant industry and its workers, several celebrity chefs have stepped forward to ask for help. 

The Consensus Is That For The Food Service Industry, Covid-19 Will Be Worse Than The 2007 Financial Crisis.

Lee Jacobs, partner, Helbraun Levey, a New York law firm focused on the hospitality industry, “You have to assume a sick person will show up to work. So what to do? We isolate them, we ask them to exclude themselves, and we send them home. You don’t want to be known as “restaurant zero.”

“Nobody Wants To Be Restaurant Zero.”