Ernst & Young Overtime Lawsuits Website
Just Because You Have a College Degree and They Paid You a Salary and Called You a "Professional" Does Not Mean They Can Deny You Overtime Pay
ERNST & YOUNG STAFF AND SENIORS
OVERTIME LAWSUITS WEBSITE HOME PAGE
This website is for current or former staff or senior employees of Ernst & Young who want to provide assistance to the California or New York EY overtime lawsuits or who are seeking information about the lawsuits. Witness statements from current or former California or New York EY staff and seniors are sought to assist in having these cases certified as class actions. Please read the below instructions and use our email response form, below, to provide the information that will allow this office to prepare your witness statement. If you are interested in understanding why the attorneys bringing this lawsuit believe overtime is owed to EY staff and seniors (and why overtime would be owed even though you "agreed" to a flat salary or signed a "termination" or "severance" agreement) please visit our "Why is Overtime Owed" page." If you want to understand why you would want to assist in having this case certified as a class action please visit our "Benefits of a Class Case" page. If you are interested in joining the California or New York lawsuit against EY individually, and not just relying on the case being certified as a class action, please visit our "About Joining the Case" page. If you worked for EY in another state besides California or New York, or you worked for another big4 firm, and are interested in collecting overtime pay, please visit our other website, big4lawsuit.com for an email inquiry form.
If you are interested in information on the attorneys who are bringing this case against EY please visit Mark Thierman's website, laborlawyer.net or Leon Greenberg's website, overtimelaw.com. Mark Thierman has successfully recovered millions of dollars in unpaid overtime wages for white collar salaried employees in California.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR PROVIDING INFORMATION
FOR WITNESS STATEMENT PREPARATION
When filling in the below email response form please keep in mind the following:
1. You must, of course, provide truthful information. But do understand that the information being requested will require some amount of approximation or your statement of an "average" percentage. You are not required to have exact records, or an exact and certain memory, to provide truthful information. You must simply provide a good faith estimate. Do not exaggerate, do not minimize, just provide your best approximation.
2. Be sure to provide your contact information and in the comments section include information on what dates (approximately) you worked for EY, in what positions, in what California offices, and in what EY department.
3. In providing a description of the types of work you performed, you should focus on the sorts of work you performed most frequently. Do provide as much detail as you wish. But certain very minor work assignments may not be very important. For example, it is probably not necessary to provide information as to one particular unique type of assignment that you performed, and that took 1 or 2 hours of your time, and that you never performed again while employed at EY.
4. Some of the sorts of "busy work" or "grunt work" or work that would not be considered "professional" in nature consisted of entering spreadsheet data or formatting or organizing spreadsheets; collecting client data (for example, pulling bank statements, receipts, invoices, etc., for use in an audit or collecting client information in connection with a tax issue); taking notes at team or client meetings; gathering files or documents or retrieving information (downloading documents for example) for superiors; making copies of documents and properly organizing documents in files or binders; reviewing or checking calculations or numbers inserted into spreadsheets or on tax forms, and various other things. Describe any of these sort of things that you did and any similar things. To the extent that you also did "brain work" that is of a more "professional nature" (for example, not just gathering audit information and putting it in a spreadsheet but determining the scope of the audit and its structure) please also describe those activities too.
5. When providing percentages of time for the sorts of work you did please base those percentages on your "actual working" time. There might be periods of time (either frequent or infrequent) when you were simply awaiting an assignment. That sort of time should not be considered "actual working time." Similarly, do not consider time that you may have spent training or at EY sponsored educational sessions or traveling.
6. When providing percentages of time for the sorts of work you did it is likely you will have to allocate some percentage for the time spent performing "miscellaneous" functions, meaning any number of different things, none of which by themselves took up a significant amount of time. Please provide the most detailed breakdown that you can of the percentages of your work time that you spent on particular activities. To the extent that you can give a good faith estimate of the percent of time you spent doing a particular activity (or a group of two or more particular activities) please give a percentage of time you spent doing that activity (or those activities together as a group) and do not simply include them under any percentage for the "miscellaneous" functions you performed.