As profiled in our Workplace Class Action Report for 2017, overall complex employment-related litigation filings increased in 2016 insofar as employment discrimination cases were concerned, but decreased in the areas of ERISA class actions, governmental enforcement litigation, and wage & hour collective actions and class actions. For the past decade, wage & hour class actions and collective actions have been the leading type of "high stakes" lawsuits being pursued by the plaintiffs' bar. Each year the number of such case filings increased. However, for the first time in over a decade, case filing statistics for 2016 reflected that wage & hour litigation decreased over the past year. Additional factors set to coalesce in 2017 – including litigation over the new FLSA regulations and the direction of wage & hour enforcement under the Trump Administration – are apt to drive these exposures for Corporate America. To the extent that government enforcement of wage & hour laws is ratcheted down, the private plaintiffs' bar likely will "fill the void" and again increase the number of wage & hour lawsuit filings.
Workplace class action filing trends can inform and shape employers' efforts towards the most effective ways to avoid lawsuits from being filed in the first place. Employers looking to ward off workplace class action lawsuits can garner a great deal of information from studying the number of lawsuits filed annually and the types of lawsuits employees are most likely to file.
In our fourth installment video detailing the six key findings of the Workplace Class Action Report, we look at the numbers behind the workplace class action filings of 2016 and offer insights on the areas in which employers might focus their efforts to avoid workplace class action lawsuits in 2017.
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