Wage Law

In many overtime cases, even if liability is clear, if the employee was salaried, or alleges other off-the-clock hours, the parties often spend enormous amounts of time, energy and money trying to quantify damages by proving exactly how many hours of overtime an employee worked. Where the employer's pay or time records are inaccurate or incomplete and the employee cannot offer "convincing substitutes," the employee satisfies his or her burden by producing evidence sufficient to permit a just and reasonable inference regarding the extent of the overtime work. Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co. (1946) 328 U.S. 680, 687, 66 S.Ct. 1187, 1192. However, the more detailed and reliable the evidence, the stronger the inferences you can draw about your time estimates.

Sometimes, the proof comes from unusual sources. Have you considered GPS? This article from Law Technology News suggests you might be using GPS more in the future.

Geopositioning will aid civil cases, too. The day is not long off when we will be able to place price fixers or cheating spouses in the same room, or calculate the speed, path and braking action of colliding drivers. We'll gauge exposure to environmental toxins, challenge a witness' ability to observe, calculate wage and hour abuses, prove an employee was asleep at the switch and precisely determine a claimant's proximity to an explosion.

As GPS-enabled cell phones become a 24/7 possession for more and more employees, the ability to determine exactly where employees were, and for how long, becomes more prevalent. Soon, it might be easy to figure out exactly how late those salaried non-exempt workers were staying at the office every day.