I discussed this ignorant fuck here, but a federal appeals court just reversed a dismissal of this dumbass temp's lawsuit trying to get overtime from a law firm I have worked for and a temp agency I have not worked for. This putz's suit is based on the theory that document review is not the practice of law and could be done by chimps and, therefore, he is not exempt from overtime. What this stupid fuck apparently does not realize is that, if he wins, document review will be done by chimps, and they won't be asking for overtime. If this isn't the practice of law, then there is no reason to require that anyone doing it be a lawyer. Wages will plummet toward minimum wage and the requirement for a J.D. will disappear, forget about bar admission. Yeah, if this guy wins, we're all fucked.
Alas, he's not the only dumbass temp trying to kill our industry. This might be a shitty way to make a living, but it's the one we have in Temp Town. And this guy apparently wants to hand the job to folks formerly restricted to jobs that only require a high school diploma (like my plumber, so don't take that the wrong way. My plumber makes far more money that I do and would never be stupid enough to do this kind of work. But the stupid shits down at Starbucks with a bachelor's in gender studies or something equally useless would be happy to cut my wage in half and take my job if this fuck wins.)
Unfortunately, he appears to be winning. The federal 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals recently reversed a decision by a district court judge in the federal Southern District of New York (the suit was filed there because the law firm is based in New York and, while the work was done in North Carolina, the plaintiff figured he could get a better ruling in the more liberal New York federal courts). The district court ruled that the plaintiff, David Motherfucking Lola, failed to state a claim, granting the defendants' motion to dismiss under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)6, which requires that a complaint at a bare minimum state a cognizable claim under which the court is empowered to grant some form of relief. That's a pretty low standard.
The 2nd Circuit didn't say David Motherfucking Lola -- and, to be fair, I have no idea what plaintiff David Motherfucking Lola's middle name is, nor do I have any idea whether he has ever engaged in sexual congress with anyone's mother, and I am inclined to doubt that he has done so with his own mother -- has a winning claim here. They simply said that, if he's right about what he claims, he might have a claim. The standard on a 12(b)6 motion to dismiss is whether the plaintiff -- David Motherfucking Lola, who might not be having sexual congress with any actual mothers but certainly is fucking the mother who supports all of us in Temp Town, which is to say, temporary legal employment -- has stated in his complaint, assuming everything he says in his complaint, no matter how stupid it sounds, is true, enough to support a claim that is entitled to legal relief. If you can't write a complaint that withstands a 12(b)6 motion, you should either find another line of work or at least find a client with a better claim It's a low standard.
That doesn't mean that David Motherfucking Lola, who, the more I think about it, might still be a virgin and so is not a motherfucker in any sense of the term except that he is fucking our Mother Industry, Temp Town, has a claim. As someone who has been doing this for a while, I can tell you it requires legal judgment. It doesn't require you to be any damn good at it, as anyone who has read this blog for a while knows, but the work requires legal judgment. No matter what David Motherfucking Lola says. And if Motherfucking is not David Motherfucking Lola's middle name, I apologize.
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