This Wisdom of the Crowd (ACC member discussion) addresses whether employers classify paralegals as exempt or non-exempt employees under US law. This resource was compiled from questions and responses posted on the forum of the Employment & Labor Law ACC Network.*
*(Permission was received from the ACC members quoted below prior to publishing their forum comments in this Wisdom of the Crowd resource.)
Question: Are your paralegals exempt or non-exempt employees? If exempt -which states are you in?
Response #1: There is a very thorough analysis of this issue in Opinion Letter FLSA2005-54 from the Department Of Labor (DOL). They looked at it under the administrative and professional exemptions and found six different paralegal positions non-exempt.1
Response #2: Our paralegals are non-exempt. I recently learned that some companies treat a few of their paralegals as exempt. This might be the case, for example, if the individual is managing others, running a program or process, or managing a caseload. Obviously the key is meeting the criteria for one of the exemptions.2
Response #3: Non-exempt in California.3
Response #4: There are multiple DOL Opinion Letters on the subject, as I recall, and they all concluded paralegals are "non exempt." Now, under the FLSA you can certainly classify them as "salaried, non-exempt" if you don't want to pay them hourly, but you'll need to pay overtime for any hours in excess of 40 that they work in a given week.4
1Alicia Davenport, Senior Counsel, Eversource Energy, Connecticut (Employment & Labor Law, October 6, 2016).
2Gregory Watchman, Managing Associate General Counsel, Freddie Mac, Virginia (Employment & Labor Law, October 6, 2016).
3Anonymous (October, 2016).
4Cyrus Martinez, Associate General Counsel, Banner Health, Arizona (Employment & Labor Law, October 7, 2016).
Region:
United States
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