Wage Law

New Littler Report on Wage and Hour Compliance

Some of the best ideas for the plaintiff's bar have come from defense lawyers. The latest example: Littler Mendelson has published an interesting report entitled Total Wage and Hour Compliance: An Initiative to End the Wage and Hour Class Action War. You can download the report directly from the firm's website. It isn't just a learning tool for employers. It also provides considerable food for thought if you are represent employees, and that's all we'll say about it.

Know Of Any Other Good Blogs?

We've removed a few links from the side column. If you had a blog we listed, but haven't posted to it since 2007, or posted fewer than five times in the last twelve months, you got removed. As always, we're interested in posting links to other good legal blogs, and particularly employment-related blogs. This week we added four legal blogs, none of which are employment blogs per se.

• The California Blog of Appeal
• ClassActionBlawg.com
• Overlawyered
• Class Action Defense Blog

If you know of any we should include, especially if it is yours, leave a comment or drop us an email.

Happy May Day

While here in California, May 1 (which was also Law Day) was the day for friends of labor to abandon work and school to march in the streets, in many places, they do all that on another May Day, which falls today, May 5. We will instead celebrate Mexico's 1862 victory over the French (which at the time, was thought impressive) by tossing back margaritas at our local Mexican eatery.

Feeling Lucky?

Happy Cinco de Mayo. We might celebrate with a happy hour margarita at one of many restaurant chains where we represented classes or other large groups of employees in wage and hour claims. But that's not the only thing making us happy today. Today's a lucky day of sorts for us.

Google digs blogs. Go to Google and do a search for wage law, and click the "I'm feeling lucky" button.

We'll see you back here in a moment.

For the first time, we've skipped ahead of the U.S. Department of Labor on the Google result page for this and a few other wage & hour related searches. We're still third fourth for searches on "wage and hour law" however. We now have a real B.L.O.G. (best listing on Google). Soon, we will have the domain name www.CaliforniaWageLaw.com publishing this blog, too, and we'll be even easier to find.

Breaking News: U.S. District Court in San Diego Closed Monday Due to Bombing

At 1:40 this morning, a pipe bomb exploded at the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Courthouse in downtown San Diego. A significant amount of damage occurred, but no structural damage was found and no one was injured. The bombing will cause all proceedings tomorrow to be continued. The Southern District has issued the following notice:

* * * PUBLIC NOTICE * * *

Federal Court Cancelled May 5th

May 4, 2008 - The United States federal courthouse in the Southern District of California, located in downtown San Diego, will be closed to the public on Monday, May 5th, 2008 due to damage caused by a bomb explosion at the courthouse entrance. All federal court activity in San Diego has been cancelled. The U.S Courthouse in El Centro, California will remain open. The Clerk's Office for the federal court will be open for business on Monday.

Jurors that are scheduled for federal court jury duty on Monday, May 5th are asked not to report as required. Jurors should call 800-998-9035 after 6:00 PM on Monday evening to check the status of their jury duty for Tuesday, May 6th, 2008.

All federal court employees are required to report to work as usual. All employees must use the Federal Building entrance at 880 Front Street.

Paralegal Fees

It shouldn't be too much longer before we hear from the SCOTUS on Richlin Security Service v. Chertoff (US 06-1717) regarding the ability to recovery all of your paralegal billings when you win in a case where the prevailing party gets attorney's fees. The unresolved issue among the circuits is whether paralegal services can be recovered at the market rate, or just at the level of actual cost. The case was argued on March 19, 2008.

Admonished Orange County Judge Resigns

After several public admonishments, Superior Court Judge James M. Brooks has agreed to resign effective April 30, 2008. Earlier this month, the state Commission on Judicial Performance publicly admonished Brooks for failing to uphold order and decorum in his courtroom during a 2005 employee-discrimination case (Haluck vs. Ricoh Electronics, Inc. (2007) 151 Cal.App.4th 994) in which his judicial misconduct resulted in the reversal of a defense verdict after a jury trial. Brooks used hand-lettered signs to overrule objections and encouraged the defense attorney in such tactics as hummed the theme to "The Twilight Zone” during the plaintiff's case. We previously weighed in on the case and the initial reaction to it in posts here and here.

New Blawg on Complex Litigation

We've added another good new legal blog to the blogroll: thecomplexlitigator.com. Check it out.

Crackberries: The next big overtime wave

As this interesting article suggests, there is always a new wage & hour issue coming along. The WSJ Law Blog is asking whether Blackberrys and other PDAs may result in a new wave of wage-and-hour litigation. The potential for overtime claims is obvious, as management lawyers have noted:

“We’ll see it; it’s only a matter of time,” said Jeremy Roth, a lawyer in the San Diego office of Littler Mendelson. Roth said he has cautioned several clients about the issue in the last year, advising them to get policies in place. Added Roth: “Before there was at least an argument that no, the employee is not being truthful when they say, ‘I did all this work after hours.’ But now, that swearing contest is taken out of the mix.”

As the article also demonstrates, the creative ideas often come from defense firms, eager to find new kinds of cases to defend. [Hat tip: LaborProf Blog]

CELA Wage & Hour Seminar

The California Employment Lawyers Association, a statewide organization of attorneys representing employees in employment matters, is holding its 4th Annual Advanced Wage & Hour Seminar. It is open to members and non-members alike. The seminar will be held Friday, May 9, 2008, from 9:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. at the Hilton Oakland Airport. The full-day advanced seminar will address discovery in wage and hour class actions, as well as wage and hour litigation in the transportation industries and precertification conduct and communications.  The seminar also will include an update on new legislation and case law pertaining to individual and class action wage and hour cases.  The seminar will qualify for 6 hours MCLE credit.