ARTICLES & ANALYSIS
Insights & Commentary
Short takes on damage modeling, wage and hour data, and litigation strategy.
Wisdom That Only Comes With Experience
Thank you for visiting the Fair Value Metrics blog.
The goal of these short articles is to share the experiences we have gathered over the years in dozens of wage and hour cases. Each article is designed to quickly describe a technical or legal issue we repeatedly encounter, work we are proud of, challenges we can help your firm overcome, and to build common ground with our clients. If you have a common experience or commentary on a specific topic, please reach out and share it with us.
Select an article from the list to start reading.
ALL ARTICLES
Bonuses
Analysis Tip: Make Educated Decisions on Nondiscretionary Bonuses
Nondiscretionary bonuses belong in the regular rate, spread across the weeks they were earned. Why counsel often leave them out of damage models, and how breaking payments out daily makes the calculation manageable.
Damage Models
Do Your Damage Models Update in Real Time?
A checklist for testing whether a damage model can keep up with mediation and trial: instant totals, side by side scenario comparisons, and allocations finalized in real time without another expert revision.
Fluctuating Workweek
Fluctuating Work Week Damage Models Get Complicated Quickly
The fluctuating workweek pay method, or FWW, combines elements of a fixed salary model and traditional time and a half overtime and is intended to provide income stability for workers and cost predictability for employers. Non exempt employees receive a fixed weekly salary regardless of hours worked, including weeks with fewer than forty hours.
Data
Analysis Tip: Always Use Unique Identifiers
When building legal data for structured analysis, use employee ID as your primary method for identifying case members. It’s human nature to default to names, but names cause problems, especially across large or messy datasets.
Expert Witness
Is Your Expert Actually Doing Your Calculations?
Are you confident your expert witness understands their work well enough to withstand rigorous depositions and trial examinations? Too often, the expert your law firm interacts with isn’t the one actually performing the analysis.
Data
Analysis Tip: Don’t Track Data by Employee Name
Matching clients to their data is one of the most basic requirements of any data analysis. Although this may seem straightforward, it can become an extremely complex and subtle production issue, and is a common source of unnecessary cost, delay, and confusion in many matters.