Updating our report of Aug. 30, 1999: “A federal appeals court [last month] threw out a class action seeking overtime pay for more than 9,000 government attorneys because the lawyers didn’t get the proper written approval before putting in extra hours. … The largely anonymous class sought $500 million in overtime pay for work performed between 1992 and 1999, when Congress passed a law barring overtime pay.” We have observed before that the antediluvian overtime-pay mandates of federal labor law are easy to break inadvertently, and this would seem to be an illustration: neither the government agency charged with making everyone else obey the laws, nor its highly skilled lawyer-employees, seemed to have their eyes on the ball with regard to overtime obligations until the possibility of a retroactive claim came up. (Jeff Chorney, “Federal Circuit Says No Back Pay for DOJ Lawyers”, The Recorder, Jun. 24).

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