One of the hot topic areas in employment law and litigation has been whether work done (i.e. checking and responding to emails) on a Blackberry after work hours should be compensable time. Let's walk through this hypothetical scenario: You are on the way home from work and your Blackberry alerts you that you have new emails in your work account. You get home, read the emails, and one of those emails requires an immediate response. You take twenty minutes to type a fairly detailed reply. Should that twenty minutes be compensable time to you? As an attorney, should the time it took to reply to the email, even though it was after-work hours, be recorded as part of a billable hour if the email was from a client? What if the phone is paid for by the employer, should this simple fact alone give rise to the legitimacy of overtime pay from work on a Blackberry? Once thought of as frivilous claims are such no more...welcome to a new era of overtime wage claims in the employment law arena.

How are employers to protect themselves from such claims by employees? Well written employee policies and handbooks, I suppose. But, while such policies may cause for an increasing number of claims to be thrown out on summary judgment, there are always loopholes and as a society we can expect these type of claims to increase in the coming years.  

For full disclosure, I have and use a Blackberry. Would I ever consider claiming overtime by looking and responding to emails on it after work hours? I think not, but hey, that's just me.  But I can see many situations when overtime pay would make sense.

For more on this subject, take a look here, here, and here.

What are your thoughts on topic? Leave a comment below...