Fisher Phillips Adds a New Practice Group

Attorneys Kathleen McLeod Caminiti, Cheryl Behymer and Cheryl Pinarchick discuss the firm's new Pay Equity Practice Group in an interview with Akron Legal News. The practice group will address equal pay laws and other legislative changes impacting businesses.

Partners Cheryl Pinarchick, Kathleen McLeod Caminiti and Cheryl Behymer serve as the practice group’s co-chairs.

“The firm has seen a tremendous increase in plaintiffs’ attorneys filing a variety of lawsuits related to pay equity issues,” said Behymer, who works out of the Columbia, South Carolina office and also co-chairs the firm’s Affirmative Action and Federal Contract Compliance Practice Group.

“We are definitely seeing an increase in collective action litigation filed under the Equal Pay Act,” said Caminiti. “Judges are applying the two-step process to conditionally certifying collective actions under the Equal Pay Act (EPA) that applies to collective actions under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). This process spawned a lot of wage and hour litigation under the FLSA over the last decade and plaintiffs’ attorneys are now starting to catch on to the fact that pay equity claims under the EPA are subject to the same process.”

In a press release Pinarchick said, “The sweeping new EEO-1 reporting requirements will impose tremendous demands on employers to gather and report detailed pay data for the first time ever.”

To read the full article, please visit Akron Legal News.