Are you searching for an experienced wage and hour employer defense attorney in San Diego or anywhere in California?  Have you been contacted by a state agency, the California Labor Commissioner or a plaintiff’s attorney regarding questions of wage and hour violations?  What do you need to know about defending these types of allegations as an employer?

There are a couple of important things you need to know right out of the gate.  The first is it is important for you to contact the Watkins Firm immediately to preserve all available wage and hour defense options and to increase the likelihood of a positive outcome in your case.  A timely response can eliminate or substantially reduce your financial and legal exposure.

The second thing you need to know is plaintiff’s attorneys will often use employee-related disputes to file a Private Attorneys General Act or PAGA class action lawsuit.  The financial exposure for violations of California or Federal labor laws are quite extensive and can challenge a company of any size.

You need a Watkins Firm wage and hour employer defense attorney if you are facing any sort of payroll-related violation, minimum wage dispute, assertions of the misclassification of employees as independent contractors, piece-rate payment violations, assertions of “off-the-clock” work requirements, unpaid overtime or any other employment related lawsuit.  We also defend employers throughout Southern California in legal actions brought under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA) or any US or California wage and hour related laws and regulations.

We are often able to resolve legally complex wage and hour cases and class actions before they are able to gain any traction.  There are administrative remedies available to Watkins Firm attorneys under the law to help our clients to mitigate or eliminate potential exposures while substantially reducing associated financial damages and expenses.

Pro-Tip: “wage and hour and overtime are similar, but PAGA, a private attorney general claim against the employer is a really heating up. There are law firms that just do that and they send out constant communications to every area of employee you can imagine. And if anyone’s thinking about leaving your employment, they’re going to be tempted to get a little severance pay involuntarily and then misclassification of independent contractors.

California keeps changing the law and the courts keep changing their interpretation of the California law. So yes, the State makes it really hard to stay on top of that. Sexual harassment is always a scary thing because you can get sued for sexual harassment and lose, even though no one was actually harassed because you didn’t investigate it.  That’s a separate cause of action. Failing to investigate it according to the law, even if your investigation finds out that it was a false claim, which seems terrible, but it’s true. And then discrimination claims are always there. Retaliation again for somebody making a false claim. If you retaliate against them for lying about you and suing and lying about you, you’re still liable for retaliating against a liar. Again, terrible but true. And then general wrongful termination, how people are terminated and whether or not you comply, you can get stuck with 60 days of pay that you inadvertently didn’t know about.

I break it down into claims where you’re going to get hit with attorney’s fees versus claims where there’s no attorney’s fees allowed.

That’s really important, because the ones where you can get stuck for attorney’s fees are the ones you’re likely going to see in a lawsuit or a claim against you because the lawyers rarely go after the ones that are only break time, or only mischaracterization of how they write the paycheck. If it’s not something with an attorney’s fees clause, you’re not going to see it. You can’t stiff people for overtime and you can’t inadvertently stiff people for overtime. How does that happen? Well, you have an agreement with somebody. You tell them, and this is a great topic because the US Supreme Court just came back in Helix Oil rigging and they said, believe it or not, this conservative court said that this $200,000 a year oil worker who had an agreement that he was an highly paid individual who doesn’t qualify for overtime, he sued anyways saying that he should have gotten overtime and he took it all the way to Supreme Court five seven year battle.

And they said no, this $200,000 year guy should get more and he should get all his overtime even though it was an agreement going in. The lawyers all agreed, everyone looked at it and they wrote it up in a way where he could be deemed not in compliance with the exceptions to overtime on a federal basis. So now it’s called day worker pay. You pay your executives based on day worker, you should have a a lawyer read this decision and advise you on how you describe your pay with your highly compensated employees and your not so highly compensated employees. You should know what you’re doing when you hire the employees so you don’t get sued

In a wage and hour dispute, our remedy is to fix the wage problem at hand, if there is one. And we do that rather quickly because we get so many of them every day. So you are the plaintiff’s lawyer, you’re suing my client. Well the minute my client knows something, he’s going to tell me. I’m going to look at whatever he or she may have been doing, I’m going to fix it. It’s usually a simple fix in the way the paycheck’s written or calculated or the breaks or whatever, I’ll fix it. Pay the employee the extra $500 before the lawyer can file a lawsuit. And so if there’s no breach at the time of the lawsuit, there’s no attorney’s fees and your case goes away.” – Dan Watkins, Founding Partner

If you are seeking an experienced and proven wage and hour defense attorney for San Diego employers we invite you to review our podcast Episode 10 – The Importance of a Strong Corporate Attorney as well as the strong recommendations of our clients and contact the Watkins Firm or call 858-535-1511 for a complimentary consultation today.