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Our success springs from early case investigation and assessment. We create a unique solution for each matter to achieve the client’s goals.

When faced with the prospect of employment class, collective or representative action, companies large and small need a legal team with the subject-matter expertise, depth of litigation experience, and resources of BakerHostetler.

Our Employment/Wage & Hour Class Actions team handles matters across a wide variety of industries, countless state and federal statutes, and myriad legal issues. Our class, collective, and representative action experience includes alleged wage and hour violations, unlawful discrimination, employee privacy violations, and unpaid or underpaid employee benefits under Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”) and other laws. We also have extensive experience litigating wage and hour matters in the country’s most litigious jurisdictions, such as California (including under the Labor Code Private Attorneys General Act), Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington.

  • Tried and won class action case involving alleged race discrimination case involving promotions to supervisory positions.
  • Obtained an order denying class certification in a putative class action brought on behalf of truck drivers employed in California by a national motor carrier alleging meal break violations, unlawful wage deductions and violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) on the grounds that the named plaintiff lacked standing under the FCRA and lacked typicality and adequacy with respect to class members bound by the defendant’s arbitration agreements and class action waivers, even after the court had found the defendant had waived its right to enforce the named plaintiff’s own arbitration agreement.
  • Successfully moved to decertify a collective of nearly 2,000 manufacturing employees in a case claiming missed meal periods under federal law.
  • Obtained an order denying class certification in two related wage and hour class actions for a leading financial institution, one involving financial center employees and the other involving call center employees. We persuaded the court that there was no evidence of any de facto policies necessitating off-the-clock work or impeding the taking of meal and rest breaks and that individual issues predominated. The court also denied the plaintiffs’ request for leave to file an amended, consolidated complaint to try to cure their class certification infirmities.
  • Successfully tried an ERISA class action case for fully paid health insurance brought by retired union employees and obtained affirmance of the judgment on appeal.
  • Obtained dismissal with prejudice at the pleading stage of a proposed nationwide Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) collective action and Rule 23 Wisconsin state law and federal Truth in Leasing Act class action based on alleged misclassification of owner-operator truck drivers used by a national motor carrier, finding as a matter of law that the plaintiff and proposed collective and class members were properly classified as independent contractors.
  • Successfully narrowed proposed multistate class actions based on personal jurisdiction arguments.
  • Compelled to individual arbitrations the claims of approximately 100 named and opt-in plaintiffs who alleged they were misclassified as overtime exempt by a retailer in a proposed nationwide FLSA collective action filed in the Southern District of Mississippi.
  • Settled decades-long litigation over ERISA retiree benefits under creative arrangements after successfully seeking a U.S. Supreme Court reversal of lower court orders.
  • Defeated class certification of all claims brought on behalf of a putative class of approximately 5,000 loan collection call center employees alleging failure to pay overtime wages, provide meal and rest breaks, provide accurate itemized wage statements, and timely pay final wages as well as engagement in unfair business practices.
  • Successfully moved to dismiss on forum non conveniens grounds, based on a Wisconsin forum selection provision, a putative Rule 23 class action brought against a national motor carrier for California state law wage and hour claims based on alleged independent contractor misclassification of truck drivers, and ultimately obtained a ruling in a Wisconsin state court enforcing the Wisconsin choice of law provision that effectively mooted all the plaintiff’s claims.
  • Defeated class certification of a proposed class of banking center employees in Multidistrict Litigation (“MDL”) proceedings venued in Kansas related to approximately 30 consolidated actions alleging off-the-clock wage and hour claims by 200,000 banking center and call center hourly employees.
  • Obtained voluntary dismissal of proposed collective action through early analysis of claimed wage calculations.

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