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Current and former California employees of Time Warner Cable LLC got a Christmas present in the form of an announcement that Time Warner has agreed to settle their wage and hour lawsuit for $1.25 million.

The class action lawsuit was filed in June 2010 and alleged the cable company failed to pay its call center employees minimum wage and overtime when they worked more than eight hours a day or forty hours a week.

California labor law sets the state minimum wage at $9 per hour, which is higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Cities also have their own wage and hour laws, so employers conducting business in the U.S. need to make sure they’re abiding by all relevant labor laws. The law with the highest minimum wage takes precedence over the others. Continue reading ›

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In order to file a lawsuit against an individual or organization alleging violation of the law, the plaintiff must be able to allege specific and clear violations of the law, as well as actual damages the plaintiff suffered as a result of the alleged violation. This is as true of defamation lawsuits as it is of any other law.

Although the First Amendment protects every citizen’s right to free speech, it does not allow public statements about other people who are public figures that are intentionally or deliberately false and accuse of them of certain types of misconduct and prohibits false statements against ordinary people that wrongly accuse them of certain types of misconduct. In order to be considered defamatory, a statement has to be made publicly, and with the result that the target suffered damage to their public reputation and/or career. Opinions and general rhetoric do not qualify as defamation. Continue reading ›

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The federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) protects all employees working throughout the United States. It guarantees things like a minimum wage (which is currently set at $7.25 per hour) access to social security, and premium compensation for all overtime worked. The FLSA also defines overtime as all overtime spent working after eight hours a day or forty hours a week.

The FLSA does allow certain workers to be held exempt from these protections, but it is very specific about the qualifications workers must meet in order to be held exempt. The Act provides employees with these protections because employers generally have much more leverage than their workers, especially workers earning minimum wage. The Act therefore withholds these protections only from employees that have sufficient leverage to negotiate their own terms of work. These employees include salaried administrative assistants, executive employees, professional employees, and independent contractors. Continue reading ›

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Gift cards can be a big money maker for some businesses. They rely on some the gift cards going unused until they expire, in which case the company gets to keep the money spent on the gift card without having to cough up the product or service it was meant to pay for. Sometimes these gift cards go unused as a result of customers receiving them for things they don’t want, they forget about them, or they are simply too busy to use them before the expiration date, but sometimes the company influences the outcome to significantly decrease the likelihood that gift cards will be used before they expire.

According to a recent class action lawsuit against SoulCycle, the fitness chain allegedly issued class passes that expired in an unreasonably short amount of time. The consumer class action lawsuit was filed in August 2015 by the lead plaintiff, Rachel C., who alleges she was unable to use her single-class pass before it expired. Continue reading ›

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Employees who notice something illegal or immoral going on at work are often made to choose between their conscience and their jobs. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act prohibits employers from retaliating against whistleblowers (those who bring illegal practices to the attention of a regulatory authority), but in practice, these laws rarely have any effect.

An example of this is the case of Johnny Burris. Mr. Burris worked as a broker for JPMorgan’s office in Sun City West, Arizona as a top producing broker and earned glowing performance reviews, at least for his first few years of employment there.

Most of Mr. Burris’s clients consisted of retirees who knew very little about the complicated financial markets, so Mr. Burris considered it part of his job to avoid any investment products which might be unsuitable for his clients, expensive, and/or underperforming. Some of these investment products that Mr. Burris considered allegedly unsuitable included products that JPMorgan offered, and his refusal to promote them to his clients started to draw some criticism from his superiors. Continue reading ›

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When a group of plaintiffs file a class action lawsuit, the class needs to be defined. If the judge is not comfortable with the parameters of the class as laid out by the plaintiffs, the judge can deny class certification until the plaintiffs come back with parameters the judge agrees with.

In the case of the class action lawsuit against Uber, the judge eliminated two groups of drivers from the class: those who were hired for Uber through a limo service and those who signed up to drive for Uber using corporate or fictitious names. The judge deemed the claims of these drivers to be too different from the claims of the drivers who signed up as drivers for Uber under their own names to justify allowing them to join the class. Part of the judge’s reasoning for this was that Uber was not technically the employer of these drivers – the third party Uber used to hire the drivers was the legal employer of these drivers. Continue reading ›

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If you’ve committed a crime for which you were never charged and you’re considering doing a documentary about said crime, you might want to think again.

Thirty-four years ago, Robert A. Durst’s wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst, disappeared from her home in Westchester County. Since then, Mr. Durst has spent his time traveling between New York, Los Angeles, and Houston, funded by his estranged family’s real estate empire.

Ms. Durst’s family members have long suspected Mr. Durst of killing her, but they never had enough evidence to charge him for the crime. Three decades later, Mr. Durst sounds pretty confident that he got away with murder. Continue reading ›

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Erin Brockovich wasn’t the only one to take on a big company that had harmed thousands of people with poisoned water. Rob Bilott took on DuPont for dumping PFOAs into a local creek, when it knew the chemical had adverse health effects, but Bilott’s background was very different from Brockovich’s.

Bilott spent eight years defending large corporations from allegations of violating environmental protection laws. He ended up on the plaintiff’s side by accident.

Some neighbors of Bilott’s grandmother had referred him to a local farmer whose cattle were getting sick and dying. The farmer had linked it to a landfill next to his property owned by DuPont. The company was dumping perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) into the creek that ran through the landfill and the farmer’s land. Because the landfill was upstream from the farm, the cows were drinking poisoned water. Not only did this destroy the farmer’s livelihood, but it was inhumane because the cattle were clearly suffering. Continue reading ›

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For most of us, once we’ve sold our property, it’s gone and we never have to think about it again. Unfortunately for Mark Oberholzer, a plumber in Galveston County, Texas, the used truck he sold to AutoNation Ford Gulf Freeway in Houston continues to haunt him. The name of his company, which he painted on the side of the truck to grow his business, has turned on him and now instead of helping him gain customers, it costs him business.

Mr. Oberholtzer sold his truck to the car dealership as part of a trade-in deal for a newer model. His son started to peel off the name and phone number of the company, but the salesman told him to stop because it would mess up the paint job and that the decal would be removed later.

But it never was removed. The lawsuit alleges the dealership sold the truck at auction in November 2013, the month after they bought it from Mr. Oberholtzer. From the auction, the truck went to Turkey and apparently made its way to Syria where ISIS converted the flatbed to carry an antiaircraft gun. Continue reading ›

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With steroids running rampant in the world of professional athletes, many people just assume that most, if not all, prominent athletes are using some sort of drug (or drugs) to artificially enhance their performance. At the same time, many people who idolize certain athletes and look up to them as role models are crushed when they find out these athletes have been taking drugs to gain an unfair advantage. The field of professional athletes is extremely competitive, and when millions of dollars are on the line, the temptation to do whatever it takes to be the best can sometimes be too much to resist.

But all artificial performance enhancers are banned from professional sports. As a result, when an athlete is caught using illegal drugs, it usually means the end of their career. Because using the drugs is both immoral and illegal, any accusation of drug use must be taken very seriously. Continue reading ›

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