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The minimum wage increase is crucial, now more than ever, to protect employees from exploitation and ensure they can make a decent living wage. This article will review some of the crucial highlights that you should know about minimum wage laws in 2021.
While local and state minimum wage rates have been on the steady rise over the last few years, the federal minimum wage rate has held steady at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Some federal lawmakers have been keen on raising this rate to $15 an hour.
Supporters insist that this raise is necessary if workers are to earn a decent living wage and reduce poverty rates. On the other hand, those opposed to the federal wage hike argue that it will cost too many jobs and hurt small businesses across different sectors.
With the amount of uncertainty brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, this federal increase is not likely at the moment. That being said, supporters are optimistic about pushing ahead once things have gone back to normal.
Currently, there are 29 states, and the District of Columbia, that have a minimum wage rate which is higher than the current federal minimum wage. This has been in response to the inaction at the federal level.
As of 1 January, 20 states ushered in the new year with an increase in minimum wage. In 9 of these states, the increase was as a result of legislation passed by state lawmakers. The states in question are Vermont, New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, Michigan, Massachusetts, Maryland, Illinois, and California. The changes in New York took effect on 31 December 2020. The scheduled wage increase in Michigan was also effectively halted and pushed for later in the year, on account of the state’s unemployment numbers, which stood at more than 8.5% in 2020.
While local and state minimum wage rates have been on the steady rise over the last few years, the federal minimum wage rate has held steady at $7.25 an hour since 2009.
In another nine states, the increase was in line with automatic annual inflation adjustments. These states are Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Ohio, South Dakota, and Washington. Each of these states has some provision in their state minimum wage and employment law for the annual adjusting of the wage to reflect changes in prices compared to the preceding year. This adjustment ensures that workers experience no decline in their purchasing power.
For the remaining two states, namely Missouri and Arkansas, the New Year’s raise resulted from ballot measures that voters passed. In addition to these 20 states, five others, namely Virginia, Nevada, Oregon, Connecticut, and Washington, DC, are gearing up for minimum wage increases expected to occur later in the year.
Currently, a total of 44 localities, that is, counties and cities, with a minimum wage that is higher than their state minimum wage rate. Half of these localities hiked their minimum wage on New Year. Again, 13 out of these 44 localities are expected to increase their minimum wage rate later in the year.
There are some significant differences in how the various states are choosing to go about the whole minimum wage rate increases. States like Florida, for example, are choosing to go with gradually increasing the wage over time until it gets to a particular mark. The states consider indicators such as the employment index in the state, as well as the consumer price index.
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Other states, such as Michigan, have provisions to pause any scheduled wage increases if the economy is not doing as well. This was witnessed this year when the wage hike had to be pushed to a later date.
Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, have no minimum wage. In two states, namely, Wyoming and Georgia, there is a minimum wage rate that is lower than the set federal rate. In these states, the federal rate applies only to jobs covered under federal laws. Even within the same state, it is not uncommon to find that the minimum wage rate varies by the size of the employer and the locality, among other considerations.
Beyond the minimum wage hike, employers have to carefully consider their exempt workers. They may need to review salaries for this category of employees or otherwise reclassify them from the exempt status and pay these employees overtime. 2020 saw the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) raise the salary threshold that applies to white-collar exemptions from overtime to $684 a week. In some states, the salary cutoff is much higher.
Some state exempt salary requirements are tied to the minimum-wage thresholds. On the other hand, some states have exempt salary rules that are entirely separate from the minimum-wage thresholds.
An understanding of employment law will help you know if you are being paid a fair wage. Talk to an employment lawyer for more details and representation on wage-related issues and disputes with your employer.
Niall Hearty of financial crime specialists Rahman Ravelli considers the new report and its criticisms of the SFO's response to complaints.
The recently-published HMCPSI (HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate) report on the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) found that the agency was not quick enough in responding to complaints about cases and was not keeping adequate records of disputes. The SFO was, according to the report, taking up to 10 days to acknowledge emails or letters regarding complaints, and often such acknowledgements did not contain enough information. It was critical of the time taken by the SFO to resolve complaints and the levels of communication it offered regarding them.
While the report did go on to say that the general standard of investigation was good, it will arguably have done little to change the minds of those who see the SFO as an organisation that seems to create problems for itself. Its publication was sandwiched between the conviction and sentence of Paul Bond, the last of four men to be jailed over the use of bribery to secure huge oil contracts in Iraq.
This fourth conviction was secured by the SFO in a re-trial and came after the agency’s lengthy and high-profile Unaoil investigation, which uncovered the payment of over $17 million in bribes to secure contracts worth $1.7 billion. But while the conviction and sentencing will have buoyed the mood of the SFO – after what had been a fraught investigation - any celebrations regarding this must have been at least slightly dampened by this report’s criticisms.
The report paints a picture of an agency that is seeking to deliver justice to the victims of serious and complex financial crime and is intent on identifying and punishing those responsible for such wrongdoing. Yet its complaints procedures seem to be falling short – and this is something that does need to be addressed.
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Such a shortcoming goes beyond the issue of what marks out of 10 the SFO would receive in a customer satisfaction survey. A failure to handle complaints adequately damages not just the reputation of the SFO but the wider criminal justice system. At a time when it is having to deal with a backlog of Crown Court trials and criticisms over the implementation of the Nightingale courts, any inability to respond to problems as they are highlighted can only make a tricky situation worse.
Two years ago, the HMCPSI reported that the SFO’s sharp focus on case work delivery had led to a culture where a neglectful approach to management was tolerated. A previous HMCPSI report had raised the issue of SFO cases being slow to progress. The SFO responded to the 2019 report by announcing a raft of measures to tackle the problems that had been highlighted. The years since the slow pace of investigations was reported on have seen the SFO closing a number of long-running investigations, as its Director Lisa Osofsky has made clear her intention to speed up the agency’s activities.
It now remains to be seen if the SFO can and will pull out all the stops to address the problems this most recent report has detailed. There may be some who regard the issues raised by HMCPSI as relatively minor in the big scheme of things. But the SFO is an organisation that relies on information gathering. Communication plays a large role in achieving that. A failure to communicate in a timely, organised and appropriate way with those it needs to be in touch with can only hamper its efforts to achieve the goals it sets itself.
Boston Scientific Corp has agreed to a $188.6 million settlement to resolve claims that it falsely marketed the safety of its surgical mesh products for women.
Several state attorneys general announced the settlement on Tuesday. The $188.6 million will be split between 47 states and the District of Columbia.
The mesh products at the heart of the false marketing accusations are designed to be implanted in women to treat common health conditions such as urinary incontinence and other conditions that can result from a weakening of the pelvic region due to childbirth, age and other factors.
According to the attorneys general, Boston Scientific failed to disclose the full range of irreversible complications, such as chronic pain and voiding dysfunction, that can result from implanting mesh. The company’s mesh products have been implanted in millions of women.
"Boston Scientific's deception caused women to suffer in deeply personal ways," Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in a press release. "I hope this money will provide some measure of relief to the thousands of Washington women who live with the undisclosed side effects of these devices every day."
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In addition to the payment to the states and DC, Boston Scientific agreed to be subject to a number of marketing reforms. The company agreed to disclose the complications of implanting mesh in understandable terms in its marketing materials and refraining from representing the inherent risks of mesh as common to other types of treatment for the same conditions.
Boston Scientific will also be required to inform healthcare providers of the risk of significant complications resulting from their products’ use and disclose any potential conflicts of interest from sponsoring data or clinical studies regarding mesh that it publishes.
DLA Piper announced its diversity and inclusion goals on Tuesday, targeting a global female partnership of at least 35% by 2025.
The international firm aims to build on its present 21% female partnership. It aims to have reached 30% within four years, and to have doubled to at least 40% by 2030.
In addition, DLA Piper intends for at least half of all its internal partner promotions to come from under-represented groups. The firm’s statement specified that these groups would include “cultural heritage and ethnicity, gender and identity, disability and neurodiversity, background and social mobility, sexual orientation and people working part time.”
“The legal industry has long grappled with diversity and inclusion and good intentions alone will not get us to where we need to be,” said Simon Levine, DLA Piper’s Global Co-CEO. “As well as simply being the right thing to do, ensuring a level playing field for everyone in our business and being representative of the communities we serve is critical in enabling the diversity of thought needed to help our clients solve complex problems and seize opportunities.”
“Publicly stating our commitment means we are accountable. Achieving these goals will be only part of our journey, and we will continue on a path of setting goals for under-represented groups across the firm.”
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DLA Piper joins a growing number of firms committing to gender parity in their senior ranks. Freshfields declared earlier this month that it is targeting a minimum 40% female partnership by 2026, as did Clifford Chance – though by 2030.
Linklaters also announced today that it is aiming for a firm-wide female partnership of 40%, having previously failed to meet its aim of 30% between 2015 and 2020.
On Monday, Pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell moved to dismiss a defamation lawsuit brought against her by Dominion Voting Systems.
In her motion to dismiss, Powell argued that her earlier claims that Dominion was involved in widespread voter fraud during the 2020 US presidential election were so outrageous that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact.”
Lawyers representing Powell argued that her claims asserting that Dominion had conspired with Democrats to rig its voting machines to switch votes to Joe Biden were obviously her own “opinions and legal theories” rather than statements that the public would immediately believe. Dominion’s own descriptions of Powell’s statements as “outlandish” and “wild accusations” support this, they argued.
“Such characterisations of the allegedly defamatory statements further support Defendants' position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process,” Powell’s defence lawyers wrote.
Dominion sued Powell for $1.3 billion in January over her dissemination of conspiracy theories involving the company in the aftermath of the election. The firm said it was forced to spend $565,000 on private security to protect its employees as harassment and death threats mounted, and that it projected a $200 million profit loss in the next five years due to the damaging claims.
Dominion has also filed another $1.3 billion lawsuit against former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for pushing the same conspiracy theory.
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Over 4,000 lawyers have signed an open letter calling for Bar Associations to condemn and investigate Powell’s behaviour, which they argue was part of a campaign to “subvert constitutional democracy.”
Lawyer Monthly hears from Kiren Azam, whose career trajectory changed dramatically through the Transition to Teach programme.
As an immigration lawyer, I worked as part of a private immigration team on asylum and immigration cases, EU residence and nationality law. In 2020, I decided to make a major career change and train as a secondary school French teacher, supported by the Department for Education-funded Transition to Teach programme.
The reason I went into law in the first place was due to the encouragement of those around me, such as teachers and family. They advised that my skills and personality would be well suited to law, and this advice followed through to me studying for a law degree. After law school, there was the expectation and a certain pressure that I would continue to the next stage and become a lawyer.
Without that encouragement into law, I would have chosen to study French or history. Law wasn’t perhaps the career I had envisaged for myself when I was younger but I could see that my skills fit the law profession. I naturally gravitated into leadership roles and it was something I enjoyed.
After graduating, it was straight to a law firm, with a focus on immigration and particularly in the realm of deportation of foreign nationals. I had my daughter, moved firms and deliberated with the idea of taking final exams. Again, the encouragement was there for me to stay in law, and my colleagues and mentors were supportive in helping me develop my career.
However, in 2020, I decided to train as a teacher, moving from London to Bradford and starting initial teacher training. My route into teaching was a school-centred initial teacher training (SCITT) course, which is a practical route into teaching.
Again, the encouragement was there for me to stay in law, and my colleagues and mentors were supportive in helping me develop my career.
I had fantastic teachers at school which contributed to my respect and admiration for the profession. I grew up in Brent, London, and one teacher that really stood out was Andria Zafirakou, who was awarded the Global Teacher's Award in 2018 - the first UK teacher to win this award. Andria was an advocate for equality, championing inclusion and respect for all. Andria would stand by the school gates at the start and end of the day, greeting pupils in their mother tongues. If a pupil needed someone to stand up for them, if they were being mistreated or misheard, Andria would be that advocate. Andria was hugely inspirational to me as a young woman.
Law is a very well respected career, and I’m sure the perceptions of the law profession contributed to the advice from my parents and teachers to carve out a career in law. I feel that perceptions of teaching are also very positive nowadays, particularly during the pandemic, as we have seen how hard teachers have worked. The support that I’ve had since starting my teacher training has been incredibly strong.
Transition to Teach has been invaluable to me during the transition to my new teaching career. One example is the assignments. I was quite used to academic writing, but writing in law is quite different from writing in education. Having a highly qualified guidance and development adviser from Transition to Teach on hand, to answer questions and provide support, has helped so much.
It’s also about having a mentor outside of the school setting, professional guidance, and wellbeing and mental health support which is vital in such a fast-paced, responsible role. In the early stages, we talked about what transferable skills I could bring to my new career as a teacher, which was illuminating and reassuring too, knowing that I already had many of the skills that would ensure success.
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The transferable skills that I can take from law to teaching including being able to work and perform in a high pressure environment, communication and that drive to go above and beyond for my students. My goal is to be a teacher who is as passionate about the rights, freedoms and aspirations of her pupils, as Andria once showed me was possible. Hopefully, once I qualify, I can work with pupils in disadvantaged areas and perhaps be that inspiration to the young people I teach.
The UK’s competition Competition and Markets Authority has launched an investigation into the acquisition of Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House owner Bertelsmann.
The $2.2 billion acquisition of Simon & Schuster was agreed last year after Bertelsmann outbid Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, a move that Penguin hoped would strengthen its US presence. If completed, Simon & Schuster will continue to be managed as a separate publishing unit under Penguin Random House.
The merger is the second major deal by CEO Thomas Rabe since Bertelsmann took control of Penguin Random House from Pearson. Rabe said that the company entity formed by the Simon & Schuster merger would have a share of less than 20% in the US market, making the move “approvable”.
Concerns over the deal were raised by US writers’ groups including the Authors Guild, who called for the Department of Justice to block it. The Guild warned that the companies’ merger would bring "well more than half of key US book markets under the control of a single corporation,” potentially posing a threat to “freedom of speech and democracy in the United States”.
News Corp CEO Robert Thomson has also criticised the deal as operating on “anti-market logic” that would create “a book behemoth”.
Firms will be invited to comment on the CMA’s investigation up to 7 April, after which the body will make a phase one decision on 19 May.
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“We have notified the acquisition of Simon and Schuster to the UK Competition and Markets Authority as is normal in such circumstances and we are working with the CMA in its review,” a Penguin Random House UK spokesperson said in a statement.
Penguin is the world’s biggest trade publishing group, with more than 15,000 new publications and more than 600 million books sold each year.
Altice USA has reached a nearly $72 million settlement with New York over what the state has deemed the telecom provider’s failure to adequately prepare for or respond to Tropical Storm Isaias in August, during which more than 439,000 customers lost service.
"It is beyond unacceptable to leave hundreds of thousands of customers without the ability to access the Internet, especially during a time when so many people rely on broadband for work and school," Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a statement.
He added that the almost $72 million settlement is the largest ever reached with a company overseen by the state’s Public Service Commission for failing to follow emergency response procedures.
The settlement follows a report in February from the Public Service Commission finding that Altice had “apparently failed” to follow significant parts of its storm readiness and emergency response plans when the tropical storm struck New York on 4 August 2020. The report specified violations including inadequate communication with customers, government officials and electric utilities, and failure to make sufficient readiness and restoration plans.
As a result of its failure to adequately plan, Altice was left unable to restore service quickly or to communicate effectively with customers experiencing service outages, the report said.
Several other phone and TV providers reported similar outages during the storm. The report also criticised Frontier Communications for its response to the crisis.
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Altice will spend $68.5 million to upgrade its infrastructure and technology, including for storm responses, for which customers will not be billed. The company has also provided $3.4 million in customer credits.
Altice serves around 5 million customers and owns the Optimum brand in the New York area. In the south-central United States it uses the Suddenlink brand.
IP Law Summit 2021
Date: 16-17 June 2021
-Location: Miami, Florida
The IP Law Summit is an invitation-only, premium Summit bringing leading IP executives and innovative suppliers and solution providers together. The Summit’s content is aligned with key IP challenges and interests, relevant market developments, and practical and progressive ideas and strategies adopted by successful pioneers.
For More information and to Register please click here
Eleanor Weaver, CEO of Luminance, discusses the role technology is playing in the expansion of major financial services firms and what it means for the legal sector.
For some time now, the Big Four have had their sights set on the legal market. Deloitte’s acquisition of Kemp Little, a 114-person strong law firm, earlier this year doubled the size of its legal division overnight, and a recent study by Thomson Reuters found that the Big Four’s market share in the legal sector is projected to grow by 12.9% this year alone.
These Alternative Legal Service Providers or ‘ALSPs’ such as the Big Four are often characterised by their willingness to rip up the rule book that has been written and embedded by more traditional law firms over the past 100 years. Innovative pricing structures, bold acquisitions and senior hires have put these players in a position to compete with even the world’s largest law firms. 23% of large firms in the UK and US say they lost business to the Big Four in 2019, for example. But above all, it is their tech-driven approach to making legal services more efficient that is raising the stakes in the legal market.
Unconstrained by the typical structure and hierarchy of a traditional law firm, ALSPs have found more latitude to change their business practice, with technology at the heart of their service delivery model. Luminance, which uses artificial intelligence to help lawyers read and analyse vast quantities of documentation, is deployed by all of the Big Four, and we’re even seeing these firms setting up legal tech incubators of their own for younger start-ups in the space. Just recently, EY GSA completed a due diligence review of over 6,000 documents 50 times faster with Luminance than it would have taken them manually, perfectly illustrating how the Big Four are using AI to deliver insightful results to their clients in a much more time and cost-efficient way.
23% of large firms in the UK and US say they lost business to the Big Four in 2019.
This is all the more pertinent against a backdrop of heightened client demands and pressure to do ‘more for less’. For one, the pandemic has caused businesses around the world to assess their costs across the board, including those associated with their legal counsel. But beyond that, clients are also becoming more sophisticated in their knowledge of the transformative power of technology, and AI in particular, causing them to demand legal analysis on the issues they face at increasingly competitive costs.
Until recently, it was something of a given that budding young lawyers would enter the practice of law with big dreams of cracking open cases or closing big deals, only to be met with monotonous, repetitive document review work. But AI is changing that narrative by allowing legal professionals to cut these review times in half, leaving more time to be focused on the creative and analytical work that they entered the profession for.
Yet the question still remains: how worried should Big Law really be about these innovative market players? A 2019 report by Prism Solutions found that two-thirds of UK lawyers surveyed were “concerned” about the threat posed by accounting firms and ALSPs, with 45% saying they would consider them a “major threat”. Specifically, the report suggests that it is the ability of the Big Four to offer legal services in a "more transparent, simplified and fixed-fee manner whilst delivering superior client satisfaction" that is causing concern, with technology and new ways of working allowing these firms to be more flexible in their pricing models. A contrast to traditional law firms that have often struggled to shift their models from billable hours and 6-minute increments.
And yet, Big Law still dominates. In 2019, the total market for ALSPs was worth $10.7 billion, a figure that pales in comparison to the revenues of some of the world’s largest law firms. Last year alone, Clifford Chance and Allen & Overy both recorded revenues of more than £1.6 billion, while elite US firm Latham & Watkins made $3.8 billion. Arguably, the level of expertise and reputation that many of these top law firms employ would be difficult to replace. And with law firms themselves increasingly leveraging ALSPs as a form of subcontracting to help save money and provide additional services, there is arguably room for both players in the market.
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Whichever way you look at it, the increasing diversification of the legal sector and the Big Four’s innovative use of the latest advances in technology has raised the stakes for law firms. Big Law’s ability to innovate with AI may well determine their competitive advantage.
