The federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) defines overtime as any time spent working after eight hours a day or forty hours a week. It also requires employers to pay their workers one and one-half times their normal hourly rate for all the overtime they spend working. Some employers maintain…
Death is a part of life and that’s even more true in certain places of our communities, such as hospitals and nursing homes. It’s expected that most people will die there or shortly after their stay, but there are still plenty of deaths happening in these places that are preventable.…
It’s often more cost effective for companies to hire independent contractors to perform certain jobs, rather than hiring employees. Even for part-time employees, companies are responsible for paying things like employment taxes and Social Security, none of which they have to worry about with independent contractors. There are benefits to…
Whether an airline employee can avail himself of state whistleblower protections currently depends on which federal circuit he finds himself in. He should hope not to be in the Eighth Circuit, which continues to find state whistleblower laws preempted by the federal Airline Deregulation Act (ADA), even where the employee…
Value stores like Meijer and T.J. Maxx, which have built a reputation for providing discounted items, allegedly don’t always use the best business practices for attaining those items. Many of them are sourced from outside the U.S., where labor is cheap, and allegedly sometimes they resort to knockoffs, which are…
Most people who are active on the internet are accustomed to seeing many different memes on a daily basis. People take famous photos or freeze frames from movies, attach their own funny and/or enlightening quotes to them and post them on the internet. Some of these memes go viral and…
In this online shopping age, when consumers click “place your order” on Amazon.com or any retail website, do they really know what they are agreeing to? The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recently considered the question in Nicosia v. Amazon.com, Inc., No. 15‐423‐cv (2nd Cir. 2016). In…
Trademarks can be trickier than a lot of people realize. Although it would be wonderful to simply tell the government you’re trademarking something and rest assured that it will be protected from that point on, the realities of applying for and protecting one’s trademark status are much more blurry. This…
Peter Doig isn’t exactly a common name, but the world-famous painter of that name had the bad fortune of bearing a similar name to that of Peter Edward Doige, who is apparently the true creator of a landscape painting at the center of a highly unusual lawsuit that was recently…
Non-compete agreements were initially included in employment contracts with high-level executives at tech companies, but in recent years employers have increasingly been including them in their contracts with almost all their workers. Non-compete agreements were designed to protect the company’s legitimate business interests by preventing executives with trade secrets and/or…