Tennessee Employment Lawyer Blog

The Higgins Firm PLLC, was created to serve all the law needs of the residents in Tennessee as well as across the country. We have offices in Nashville and Memphis. To better meet all of these needs, the firm was divided into five sections but everyone works together as a team to help meet the needs of our clients. These four sections include: civil litigation, workers compensation, nursing home neglect and employment law litigation. The three partners of this team are: Jim Higgins, Don Himmelberg, and Rick Piliponis. We all work together to make sure that we can serve our clients in the best manner possible. Here at the firm, we ask questions about our clients, but we believe that is important that our clients know about us and what we stand for.

Jim Higgins oversees the serious injury and wrongful death litigation within the firm. He is the partner that handles cases in these areas of practice. This section may include: workers compensation, medical malpractice, nursing home abuse, vehicular accidents, and premises liability cases. He began his career in law by helping to defend insurance companies but since than has dedicated his career over the past several years to only representing those that have been injured. Mr. Higgins works with many experienced attorneys to help him best represent clients that have been injured. Mr. Higgins has also joined organizations such as the Million Dollar Advocates Forum which limits its membership to attorneys who have won million and multi-million dollar verdicts and settlements to help better serve their clients. He not only represents clients where he lives, but all across the United States.

Don Himmelberg is the partner that oversees the criminal litigation section of the Firm. He is a former assistant district attorney and he represents clients who have been accused of misdemeanors and felonies. His main areas of practice are in state and federal court.

Rick Piliponis graduated from the University of Tennessee and DePaul University Law School and currently oversees and manages the business and malpractice ligation sections for the Higgins Firm.

This firm also has a biligual lawyer who is experienced in helping with cases concerning the Hispanic and Latino communities. He is William W. Merrell. William W. Merrell graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1964. He then graduated from the South Texas College of Law in Houston in 1974. He then attended graduate school at La Universidad de las Americas in Mexico City and the University of Madrid in Spain. He is a vital part of the firm and is known to many Hispanic clients as “El Abogado del Pueblo”.

Jon Street is a graduate of Wake Forest Law School. He leads the firm’s employment law litigation group. He has handled overtime, wage and hour, and discrimination cases throughout the state.

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We all know that no one has not felt the suffering of the struggling economy. We have all had to cut backs, worry about how to pay the bills, and deal with layoffs and having to find a new job. Unfortunately, the residents of Tennessee may feel even more of the struggle very soon.
On Wednesday March 24, 2010, Governor Phil Bredsen announced that Tennessee will be mailing out layoff notices to 853 state employees this week. He also added that another 317 layoff notices will be sent out over the next six months as the state will shut down the Clover Bottom long-term care facility for the mentally disabled in Nashville.

Most of the layoffs are unfortunately being made for business reasons and budget cuts in the intellectual disabilities and children’s services field. The Governor had said that he is “just trying to get the state through this very hard economic time”. Workers will be given three months notice that their jobs will be eliminated and will given $3,200 in severance pay and will be eligible for college tuition credits.

These notices are being sent out now so that the jobs will be vacant by the state’s next budget year beginning on July 1st.

Tennessee employs about 45,000 full time workers and the Clover Bottom facility is the state’s oldest facility for the mentally disabled. Closing it will save about $36 million per year in state and federal dollars. The facility’s one hundred residents can be moved to other facilities in East Tennessee or to other private facilities.

For more information on this story, you may visit: http://www.tennessean.com/article/20100324/NEWS02/100324012/TN+state+employees+to+get+layoff+notices+in+mail+this+week+

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Tennessee Employment Law Blog explores recent wage and hour lawsuits in this entry to inform Tennessee hourly wage workers about common means employers use to underpay employees.

Times are tough. Tennessee businesses and employers across the nation are meeting tough times with layoffs and cutting costs. But when employees’ pay is illegally cut, some employees have chosen to get tough back and are able to recover unpaid wages or unpaid overtime by working with employment lawyers on wage and hour lawsuits.

Wage employees in Pennsylvania are taking on Aramark Corp., the Philadelphia-based food-service giant, that allegedly cheated its workers out of overtime pay and the lunches and breaks required by federal workplace law under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). This week several Aramark wage workers filed a summons in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court in what may become a class-action lawsuit. Their attorney estimates damages of up to $2M for the 3,000 workers employed to provide service Aramarak’s stadiums

Previously in April of last year, Aramark settled, without admitting wrongdoing, a similar case involving 419 workers. The present filing entered as evidence a sample pay stub that demonstrates, according the plaintiff’s attorney, the company’s deliberate design to make it difficult for workers to determine their amount of hours worked.

Some allegations center on the unpaid overtime for when an employee worked in two separate locations for Aramark. Additionally, 30 minutes was automatically deducted from hours worked, even though half-hour lunches were not always available to employees. For some workers, not receiving payment for these automatically deducted 30-minute lunches meant they were being paid less than minimum wage.

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In recent news, a Landscape company in middle TN that the U.S. Department of Labor believes to have “failed to ensure that their employees received the minimum federal wages and overtime payments as required by the Fair Labor Standards Act”, has agreed to pay $450,000 in back wages to eighty-one employees. According to the news release and other reports, the company, Peach Tree Maintenance Inc. employed both local and foreign workers. Twenty-four of the employees were hired based on the Federal H-2B program that permits employers to hire foreign workers to meet a temporary need for non-professional, and nonagricultural workers”. Also, according to the Department of Labor eighty-one of these employees “were due a total of $433,995 in back wages because they were either paid a flat rate daily without overtime or paid straight time for all hours worked over forty per week”. Twenty-four of these employees were also required to pay their own transportation costs from Guatemala which leads to a reduction in their pay below the federal minimum wage.

During the investigation, it was realized that these employees were an additional $15, 481 in back wages. Employers are required under FLSA to pay minimum wage, overtime payment, and to keep all accurate records of all hours worked for a two-year period. The FLSA requirements to pay minimum wage and overtime are not discritionary. According to their website, Peach Tree Maintenance Inc is located in Lascassas, Tenn., and provides services to the Middle Tennessee area.

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In recent qui tam law news, more health care providers have agreed to return moneys and pay fines for allegedly inappropriately billing Uncle Sam. U.S. taxpayers have the brave employees who blew the whistle and filed qui tam lawsuits against their employers to thank for reporting this corporate misconduct. In previous Tennessee Qui Tam Law Blogs, we have covered pharmaceutical companies that fraudulently bill government health care programs and medical institutions charging Medicare for unnecessary medications.

In one lawsuit initiated by whistleblower employees settled earlier this week, kickbacks using Medicare and Medicaid moneys were alleged by federal prosecutors in the False Claims lawsuit. Christiana Care Health System agreed to pay the United States and Delaware a combined $3.3M to resolve allegations of paying kickbacks to a Delaware neurology firm. In another qui tam lawsuit, a $14M settlement was reached between Feds and two Atlanta-based nursing home chains accused of kicking patients over to a Kentucky-based pharmaceutical firm.

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