{"id":175641,"date":"2025-06-11T12:31:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-11T12:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/175641\/"},"modified":"2025-06-11T12:31:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T12:31:10","slug":"talking-employment-law-grand-forks-herald","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/175641\/","title":{"rendered":"Talking employment law – Grand Forks Herald"},"content":{"rendered":"

Entrepreneurs who want to start a business may want to consider consulting an attorney to help with proper business formation and legal contracts to avoid costly legal issues down the road. That\u2019s according to Lisa Cagle, an attorney with the law firm of Gunderson, Palmer, Nelson and Ashmore, LLP in Rapid City, South Dakota. Cagle focuses her practice primarily on business and estate planning, employment law and real estate law.<\/p>\n

\"Lisa<\/p>\n

Lisa Cagle is an attorney with the law firm of Gunderson, Palmer, Nelson and Ashmore, LLP in Rapid City, South Dakota.<\/p>\n

\/ Submitted<\/p>\n

\u201cGetting things set up right from the beginning is going to cost a little bit up front, but can save you tens of thousands of dollars on the back end if we’re trying to fix it,\u201d she said. \u201cWe’ll see businesses come in and they’ve been running along just great, and they run into a problem that we could have easily fixed or prevented with a contract in the beginning, and now we’re having to have the court involved, and that’s so much more expensive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Consulting an attorney to review an organization\u2019s employee handbook and policies can be beneficial for the business. They can check for inconsistencies in policies and make sure anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies are written correctly to ensure protection of not only the business but also the employee.<\/p>\n

Employee classification is another area that can get a business into trouble if it\u2019s determined a worker is misclassified, such as a salaried employee who should actually be classified as hourly.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou want to make sure that your 1099 workers are actually 1099 workers. They shouldn’t be W-2 \u2014 that can get you in trouble if they’re misclassified,\u201d she said. \u201cThat can get you in trouble with the Department of Labor. It can get you in trouble with state and federal revenue, IRS, Department of Revenue.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said a small business owner may think it\u2019s more convenient to classify someone as an independent contractor or freelancer rather than an employee because they don\u2019t want to have to pay into unemployment insurance, for example, but that can come back to bite them.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut that little bit of inconvenience is small compared to what happens if you start getting in trouble with state and federal agents,\u201d she said. \u201cYou really want to make sure if you have a person who is a 1099 worker, that they meet all the requirements to be a 1099 worker and document it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cagle said when employment issues escalate to the point of needing a lawyer, things have usually gotten out of control. To prevent this, employers should have clear, written policies in place \u2014 especially for sensitive matters like terminations or drug use. For example, with the legalization of medical marijuana in South Dakota, it’s essential to have clear guidelines about testing and workplace expectations, particularly since federal law still prohibits marijuana. Policies will vary depending on the nature of the business and any federal contracts involved.<\/p>\n

Beverly L. Adams is an attorney with Fredrikson & Byron in Fargo, specializing in employment-related matters and health care law. She provides guidance on items such as employment investigations, disciplinary matters, employment contracts and union labor negotiations.<\/p>\n

\"Beverly<\/p>\n

Beverly L. Adams is an attorney with Fredrikson & Byron in Fargo, specializing in employment-related matters and health care law.<\/p>\n

\/ Submitted<\/p>\n

One of the more frequent reasons she\u2019s contacted by businesses is because they want to terminate an employee.<\/p>\n

\u201cDepending on the scenario, is this employee a minority, is it related to FMLA leave or ADA leave, is this a whistleblower, do they belong to some protected class? You\u2019ve got to go through that whole gamut, what are the facts, what are the risks, understand the situation and figure out how much risk the company wants to take with it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Adams also helps small businesses that want to hire their first employee, for example, and have questions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first thing I ask is, do you have an employee handbook? There\u2019s small to mid-size companies that currently don\u2019t have handbooks. There are some presidents, CEOs, COOs, who believe it\u2019s going to tie their hands and restrict them on what they can and can\u2019t do. \u2018I don\u2019t want to have rules and want to be free to address things as they come.\u2019 A lot of times what small businesses don\u2019t realize is that, at a minimum, you want to have a discrimination-harassment section in your handbook to describe what it is, to advise employees what their rights are and to give employees the roadmap to bring those claims forward and to make them feel comfortable with creating a culture where you don\u2019t tolerate this type of behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

The only ways a company has liability for discrimination or harassment are if they don\u2019t have a policy, so employees don\u2019t even know how to raise the issue and report it, or they have a policy and ignore it, Adams said. Organizations should make sure that when someone is hired, they are set up for success by providing them with the company\u2019s code of conduct.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of companies don\u2019t realize the importance of an employee handbook. It may seem like a waste of effort or a requirement they don\u2019t see value in, but it does have a lot of value because it can limit the liability that your company can be exposed to in a harassment or discrimination complaint,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Her advice to business owners who are going to implement a unique compensation program is to run it by an attorney to make sure they\u2019re not violating any state or federal wage laws, because a mistake can be costly.<\/p>\n

\u201cBe very careful when you\u2019re classifying somebody as exempt, because there are some gray areas. I\u2019ve even worked at law firms when there was a time all paralegals were salaried, treated as exempt employees, and it turned out a lot of law firms got it wrong. They were actually hourly employees,\u201d she said. \u201cWhenever you\u2019re going to classify someone as salaried, however they\u2019re described in a job description, be sure that matches what they\u2019re doing, and that you\u2019ve vetted them out, that they\u2019re actually an exempt employee.\u201d<\/p>\n

The wage and hour laws state that in a good-faith error, you have to go back two years to remedy any wage and hour errors. If it\u2019s a willful violation, it\u2019s a three-year lookback period, she explained.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose damages can be large,\u201d Adams warned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Entrepreneurs who want to start a business may want to consider consulting an attorney to help with proper…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":175642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3092],"tags":[51,897,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-175641","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-jobs","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114664747012867476","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}