Nathan J. Plumb

Nathan recently completed the successful representation of a national restaurant chain who had been accused of unlawfully terminating an employee because she filed a workers’ compensation claim. After a day-long deposition of the plaintiff during which she admitted having no knowledge of whether her supervisor actually knew whether she had filed a workers’ compensation claim, Nathan was able to quickly negotiate a low five-figure settlement amount with the Plaintiff. Nathan has many other similar successes where he has either secured an early dismissal of a case for the client or has settled a case for an amount significantly less than what the Plaintiff demanded and less than what it would have cost the client to get the case dismissed.

Nathan is currently assisting with the defense of a client who has been accused of paying its employees less than the legally required minimum wage. In this case, the client employs delivery drivers to serve its customers.  The delivery drivers are accusing the client of not reimbursing the drivers for the full amount of the expenses the drivers incur in making the client’s deliveries and therefore paying the drivers, in effect, far less than what the law requires because the drivers must pay the expenses out of their own pocket.  Nathan and co-counsel have already succeeded in convincing the drivers to dismiss a portion of the expenses for which they originally claimed to be under-reimbursed.  The case is a nationwide class and collection action, potentially involving thousands of employees making claims against the client. Nathan has other experiences representing clients in large class action lawsuits alleging employees are underpaid, required to work off the clock, not paid overtime for hours they work in excess of 40 hours in a work week, and other similar claims. 

Nathan is in the final stages of assisting with the prosecution of a claim against a client’s former employees who left the client’s business to start their own business.  In this case, the former employees took various trade secrets and computer data from the client’s offices.  Using various Missouri state statutes and federal statutes, Nathan and co-counsel were successful in obtaining a consent judgment against the former employees requiring them to return the trade secrets and computer data, to agree to never use the information, and to avoid any future contact with specific customers of the client. On the other side of these types of claims, Nathan recently succeeded in representing a former employee by convincing attorneys for the former employer that the non-solicitation agreement entered into by the parties was not enforceable as written and that therefore the former employer had no basis for a lawsuit against the former employee.   

Nathan regularly represents a St. Louis medical care provider in many of its unemployment benefit claims filed by terminated employees.  For one particular matter in this regard, Nathan successfully argued to the Missouri Division of Employment Security that an employee’s private communications with another employee suggesting that a patient should be punished for cancelling her medical appointment at the last minute constituted “misconduct” under Missouri law and is a valid reason to deny unemployment benefits.  Nathan has also represented clients before the Missouri Division of Employment Security on the issue of whether the persons used by the client to do its work are properly classified as independent contractors or should have been classified as employees. 

Nathan recently advised one of the nation’s largest food manufacturing companies on how it could devise a bonus plan for its employees that complied with the Fair Labor Standard Act.  For this project, Nathan worked with the client’s in-house legal team, the client’s business and accounting groups, as well as the front-line supervisors who would be communicating the bonus plan to the affected employees. In all, Nathan navigated the legal requirements of the FLSA, the client’s business and profitability concerns, and the supervisor’s concerns regarding employees’ confusion and expectations of fairness to devise a bonus plan that was successfully rolled out to the client’s employees in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Nathan also regularly advises one of the largest livestock farms in the country regarding its practices to ensure that its employees are lawfully authorized to work in the United States.  In one specific instance concerning this client, Nathan was asked to audit the company’s I-9s and employment authorization practices.  To complete the task, Nathan audited nearly 1,000 I-9s and then prepared a comprehensive executive report outlining the results of the audit and advising the client on how its employment authorization practices could be improved.  In addition to this type of work for many clients, Nathan has also assisted with the criminal defense of clients, and their managers, who have been accused by the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security and Justice for employing illegal aliens.  None of the clients Nathan has represented in these criminal actions have been sentenced to jail and most have walked away with insignificant fines and monetary penalties.