A law school graduate who was hired as a $75,000-a-year litigation consultant partly because of her degree is entitled to overtime pay because the work she was assigned did not require “learned professional” skills, Southern District Judge Shira Scheindlin (See Profile) has held.
Scheindlin said the fact that Adina Kadden’s 2001 degree from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law helped her get a job with VisuaLex is not dispositive. Rather, she said, “the relevant inquiry…is whether the employee’s primary duty is the performance of work requiring advanced knowledge in a field of science or learning that is customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction.”
