Otherwise, the employer may just be setting itself up for wage-hour suits based on the premise that the after-hours use constitutes uncompensated overtime, says Mitch Danzig, “an attorney in the San Diego office of Boston-based Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo. Danzig advises his clients to give BlackBerrys only to employees who are exempt from overtime laws. ‘Plaintiffs’ firms are trolling for this,’ he said. ‘Now what you’re seeing on [plaintiffs’] firms’ Web sites are, “Have you been assigned a BlackBerry or a phone? If so, give us a call.”‘” (Ashby Jones, WSJ law blog, Apr. 22; Tresa Baldas, NLJ, Apr. 28). More: Jeffrey Hirsch, Workplace Prof Blog.
Posts Tagged ‘workplace’
Plaintiff: my lawyers cut unfair side deal with Prudential
The law firm of Leeds Morelli & Brown has recently been embroiled in controversy over episodes in which it has settled batches of employment discrimination claims while contemporaneously entering agreements in which the defendants agree to hire it (the Leeds Morelli firm) for substantial sums. Now an African-American woman who was once a vice president at Prudential Insurance and then sued the company for racial bias as a Leeds Morelli client “is asking a federal judge to set aside an arbitration award, alleging her lawyers were given improper financial inducement to keep her claim and hundreds of others out of court. According to Linda Guyden, the company paid $5 million to the law firm representing her and 358 other employees, in return for which Prudential’s total exposure was capped at $10 million and the claims were kept secret just as the company was about to be taken public.” (Mary Pat Gallagher, “Bias Plaintiff Says Lawyer Sell-Out Warrants Vacating of Arbitration”, New Jersey Law Journal, Apr. 8). For a cognate controversy over Leeds Morelli’s settlement of employment claims with Nextel Corp., see Leigh Jones, “Columbia’s Simon Blasts Professors’ Role in Nextel Bias Case”, National Law Journal, Nov. 26; Bluestone, New York Attorney Malpractice Blog, Feb. 12, 2007.
Kerviel to sue SocGen for unfair dismissal
Employment litigation Hall of Fame? “Jérôme Kerviel, the rogue trader accused of losing his bank €5 billion (£3.9 billion) in one of the financial world’s biggest scandals, has hit upon a new money-making scheme — he is to sue his former employer [Société Générale of Paris] for unfair dismissal.” (Adam Sage, “Jerome Kerviel to sue SocGen over sacking”, Times Online (U.K.), Apr. 3).
Will litigation kill academic tenure?
As universities grow apprehensive of lawsuits filed by junior faculty hired for tenure-track positions but then passed over for tenure, they are accelerating the trend toward classifying more junior positions as non-tenure-track — hastening, perhaps, the eventual demise of the tenure system entirely. (Robert Weissberg, Minding the Campus, Apr. 10). P.S. Our post has prompted a discussion at Workplace Prof Blog.
UK: ire over £200,000 payout for defense office worker
“Soldiers’ families reacted angrily after it emerged the Ministry of Defence awarded £202,000 to an office employee who strained his back picking up a printer. The ‘disgraceful’ decision left the civil servant with a larger payout than almost all the servicemen injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.” (Stephen Adams, “MoD office worker gets £200,000 payout”, Telegraph, Mar. 18).
Starbucks barista tip pool
I’m covering a judge’s $100 million ruling against the coffee chain at Point of Law.
$46,000 attorney fee request in $44.63 dispute
“Police officer Michael Harrington sued after getting snookered out of $44.63 in overtime pay. He later settled for $10,500 and sought about $46,000 in attorney fees. If that seems out of proportion, Los Angeles’ 2nd District Court of Appeal agrees with you. The court reduced the fee award to $500. ‘At the risk of understatement,’ Justice Miriam Vogel wrote last week, ‘there is no way on Earth this case justified the hours purportedly billed by Harrington’s lawyers.'” (Mike McKee, The Recorder, Mar. 5).
Steep decline in carpal tunnel cases
I’ve got some thoughts on the subject at Point of Law.
Pro bono as profit center III: Skadden and Chinatown restaurant case
Another instance of the decidedly Pickwickian sense in which some in the legal profession use the term pro bono:
Last year, a federal judge awarded nearly $1 million in attorney fees, costs and prejudgment interest to Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in a case involving workers at a restaurant in New York’s Chinatown. Chan v. Triple 8 Palace, No. 1:03-cv-06048 (S.D.N.Y.). The New York firm took the case pro bono in an attempt to collect unpaid tips on behalf of the workers.
The firm succeeded. But its request for attorney fees turned heads, especially since the workers received about $700,000.
“And you also had a large law firm telling everybody that they’re doing the case pro bono,” said Daniel A. Hochheiser, a partner at New York’s Hochheiser Hochheiser & Inwood, which represented the restaurant.
“The general understanding of pro bono is that you’re volunteering your time and effort without compensation, or without expectation of compensation,” Hochheiser said.
The case is being compared in several quarters to the Seattle school-suit fee request discussed in this space Sept. 7 and Sept. 23. (Amanda Bronstad, National Law Journal, Feb. 8; Elefant; Cal Blog of Appeal (to whom we’re happy to send the traffic). We briefly noted the Skadden fee ruling last summer.
P.S. Commenters point out — and it’s appropriate to note here as well — that Skadden, unlike Davis Wright Tremaine, says it’s giving away the fee award.
Long Island school-district attorneys
Looks like some have found ways to game the state’s employment rules:
Five Long Island school districts falsely reported to the state that a part-time private attorney was a full-time employee in each district, enabling him to earn a public pension of nearly $62,000 and health benefits for life.
At the same time, the districts paid his law firm more than $2.5 million in fees, records show.
The attorney, Lawrence W. Reich, was listed as full time by five different school districts at once – Baldwin, Copiague, East Meadow, Bellmore-Merrick High School and Harborfields, according to records supplied by the New York State comptroller’s office. In 2000, for example, he was credited with working 1,271 days in one year. The year before, he was credited with working 1,286 days….
Under Internal Revenue Service rules, a person cannot be paid both as an independent contractor and employee for the same job.
“Clearly, it’s an attempt to manipulate the system so that a person can receive Cadillac fringe benefits that a person in the private sector would otherwise not be entitled to,” said Paul Sabatino, a municipal lawyer who is also former Suffolk chief deputy county executive. …
“I followed essentially a practice that was very common among my colleagues in the industry,” [Reich] said.
(Sandra Peddie, “Five districts falsely reported lawyer job status”, Newsday, Feb. 15).