This post was published in an abbreviated form on the E&P website (May 2, 2018), which can be found by clicking here. Those portions are reprinted here with permission from E&P Copyright 2018 (800.372.1033).

A cottage industry for plaintiffs’ class action lawyers has been independent contractor (IC) misclassification lawsuits,…

Earlier today, the California Supreme Court established the Golden State as one of the least hospitable jurisdictions in the nation toward independent contractor status. Abandoning its decades-old common law test used to determine IC status, the California Supreme Court in Dynamex Operations West v. Superior Court (No. S222732), created a…

This blog post has been superseded by the post on April 30 entitled “Independent Contractor Bombshell for California Businesses” 

Tomorrow, April 30, 2018, the California Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision in a case that could change the legal test as to whether an individual is…

Yesterday, Uber Technologies, Inc. won a watershed case under federal and state wage laws on the issue of whether Uber drivers are independent contractors, as the company has steadfastly maintained. A federal district court in Pennsylvania granted summary judgment in favor of Uber concluding that UberBLACK limousine drivers, as a…

Independent insurance sales agents have been treated as independent contractors for decades. But recently, class action lawyers have begun to target insurance companies with claims that insurers have misclassified these sales agents as ICs instead of employees. These lawsuits allege that insurance companies have violated wage and hour, employee benefit,…

Last month, half of the cases that came to our attention in the area of independent contractor misclassification and compliance involved interesting issues concerning arbitration – and lessons for companies seeking to limit class action lawsuits by those they classify as ICs.

The first case involved an IC agreement that…

Last month was a busy and important month for IC misclassification and compliance law. Featured among the ten cases summarized below are the first-ever trial of an IC misclassification case in the on-demand, sharing economy (Lawson v. GrubHub Holdings, Inc.); oral argument before a state’s highest court over…

Earlier today, GrubHub, Inc. won its highly publicized case brought against it by a restaurant delivery driver / courier for allegedly misclassifying him as an independent contractor. The case drew sustained media attention during a non-jury trial in federal court in September 2017, as it was the first IC misclassification…