Staff Appraisers Represented by Nichols Kaster, PLLP File Overtime Lawsuit Against Bank of America and Subsidiaries

    MINNEAPOLIS, MN, October 02, 2015 /24-7PressRelease/ -- On September 29, 2015, a current employee of LandSafe, Inc. filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeking overtime pay. He brought the case on behalf of Staff Appraisers (also known as Residential Appraisers) who worked for LandSafe, Inc. across the country. In the complaint, he alleges that LandSafe, Inc. and LandSafe Appraisal Services, both subsidiaries of Bank of America, misclassified him and other Staff Appraisers as exempt employees, asserting that the work they perform does not fit under any of the exemptions from the law's overtime pay requirements.

According to the complaint, "Defendants have classified (and continue to classify) their Staff Appraisers, including Plaintiff and those similarly situated, as exempt from FLSA and state wage and hour protections. In June 2014, the United States District Court for the Central District of California held that Defendants improperly classified its Staff Appraisers as exempt, holding that Defendants could not satisfy the Administrative Exemption or the Highly Compensated Exemption. Despite this adverse ruling, Defendants failed to reclassify their Staff Appraisers, choosing instead to willfully violate federal law by continuing to deny overtime payments to their Staff Appraisers."

LandSafe, Inc. is a subsidiary of Bank of America that employs more than 500 Staff Appraisers to provide residential, single-family home and condominium appraisal services throughout the United States.

Plaintiff's attorney Matthew Helland stated, "a federal court in California ruled more than a year ago that Staff Appraisers at LandSafe and Bank of America are entitled to overtime. Those companies agreed to pay a very substantial settlement to resolve overtime claims for more than 300 appraisers, but they still refuse to pay overtime to Staff Appraisers. This case seeks wages for hundreds of appraisers who were not covered by the earlier case."

Plaintiffs are represented by Matthew C. Helland and Daniel S. Brome from Nichols Kaster, PLLP, which has offices in Minneapolis, Minnesota and San Francisco, California. The case is entitled, Harris v. Bank of America et al. No.: 1:15-cv-07683 (Southern District of New York).

Additional information about how to make a claim in the case may be found at www.nka.com or by calling Nichols Kaster, PLLP toll free at (877) 448-0492.

Nichols Kaster is a nationally recognized plaintiffs firm that focuses on representing employees and consumers whose rights have been violated. The firm was selected as a member of the National Law Journal's Litigation Boutiques Hot List, ranked as a Best Law Firm by U.S. News & World Report, selected as a top plaintiffs' employment law firm by Law360 and named one the top 50 Elite Trial Lawyers by The National Law Journal and Law.com.

The firm is led by its partners, who are regularly selected by their peers as Super Lawyers, and sit on the boards of numerous professional organizations, including the National Association of Employment Lawyers, the ABA Fair Labor Standards Legislation Committee and the Council for the Minnesota State Bar Association's Consumer Litigation Section.

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