Unpaid overtime lawyers · Nationwide · Free consultation

They Called You Exempt. That Isn’t Their Call to Make.

Siegel Law Group sues employers under the Fair Labor Standards Act for unpaid overtime. We represent case managers, care coordinators, utilization review nurses, claims examiners, call center staff and day-rate crews.

Find Out If You’re Owed Overtime Call (214) 790-4454

Free and confidential. You decide whether anything happens next.

100+federal overtime lawsuits

27federal courts

50+class & collective certifications

0employers ever represented

Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

They Wrote the Job Description. The Law Reads Your Actual Job.

A salary is not a reason to withhold your overtime. Employers treat it as one. The law has said otherwise for decades.

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), whether you are exempt turns on what you actually do all day and how you are actually paid — not your title, not the label on your pay stub, and not what the handbook says.¹

The administrative exemption, the one employers reach for most, requires, among other things, that you exercise real discretion and independent judgment on matters of significance.² If you follow a protocol, work from a script, or run an assessment tool somebody else built, that is a reason to doubt the label.

A twenty-second check

You are paid a salary or a day rate, and you work more than 40 hours in most weeks.
Your decisions follow a protocol, a guideline set, a script, or software somebody else designed.
Someone above you reviews or can override the calls you make.
Your title says specialist, coordinator, analyst, or manager, and your day is a queue of files.
You log into systems before your paid shift starts, or finish notes after it ends.

None of these decides your case. Each is a reason to ask.

Case managers & care coordinatorsSalaried, carrying a caseload, working a plan somebody else wrote.

Utilization review nursesApplying clinical criteria you did not write to reach a decision someone else signs.

Claims examiners & adjustersProduction work against a manual, with authority limits set above you.

Call center & customer servicePaid for the shift, not for the required work before and after it.

Oilfield & day-rate crewsA flat amount per day worked, however long the hitch runs.

Coordinators, analysts, specialistsAn impressive title, routine duties, and no overtime.

Paid a flat day rate? In 2023 the Supreme Court held that a day rate is not, by itself, payment on a salary basis — and that a day-rate worker can be owed overtime no matter how large the day rate is.³ Plenty of day-rate crews have never been told that.

Your title may not be on the list. The list is not the test. More on your overtime rights.

They Hired the Biggest Firms in America. Here Is What It Cost Them.

Fortune 500 corporations. National healthcare conglomerates. Companies with armies of lawyers. We sue them anyway.

Pruess v. Presbyterian Health Plan$38.7M

Managed care workers at New Mexico’s largest private employer who said they were misclassified as exempt. Presbyterian started with Ogletree Deakins, one of the three largest employment firms in the country. Then it upgraded to Wheeler Trigg O’Donnell, which BTI Consulting names among the fourteen most-feared firms in America. Jack Siegel served as lead counsel. Final approval granted June 24, 2026 (D.N.M.).

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Woods v. Caremark PHC, LLC$16.67M

A case alleging CVS was not paying over 15,000 call center workers for required work before and after their shifts. CVS retained Seyfarth Shaw — the Am Law 50 firm that publishes the annual ranking of the largest wage-and-hour settlements in the United States. The fund grew from $15.25 million at preliminary approval to $16,669,155.84 after additional class members were identified. Jack Siegel served as lead counsel.

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Deakin v. Magellan Health$16M

Care coordinators who said they were misclassified as exempt. Magellan did not stop at one defense firm. It hired four at once, including Baker McKenzie, the largest law firm on the planet by headcount, and Littler Mendelson, the largest employment defense firm in the country. Jack Siegel served as lead counsel.

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Loomis v. Unum Group$14.8M

A Fortune 500 disability insurer brought in Paul Hastings — an Am Law 20 firm with more than a thousand attorneys worldwide — to fight overtime claims from its own employees. Those 947 workers recovered $14.8 million.

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These companies can hire any law firm in America, and they do. Across these and other cases: Morgan, Lewis & Bockius (Am Law 10), Polsinelli (Am Law 100), Greenberg Traurig, Jackson Lewis, McGuireWoods, Perkins Coie, Duane Morris. United Healthcare took its case to the Tenth Circuit with Littler Mendelson defending, and lost both appeals. The firms that publish the annual reports on wage-and-hour litigation keep turning up across the table from us. We are still here. See every case.

Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Every case turns on its own facts.

They Can Afford This Fight. You Don’t Have To.

Nothing up front. Nothing by the hour.

We take overtime cases on contingency. We advance the costs of the case, and if we recover, those costs are repaid out of the recovery. If we do not recover, you owe us nothing — no attorney’s fee and no costs.

The consultation is free. Calling does not commit you to filing anything. Plenty of people call, get an answer, and decide not to go forward. We do not chase them. That is a perfectly good outcome.

They Want Asking to Feel Risky. Federal Law Disagrees.

What you tell us in that first conversation is confidential, whether or not you hire us. We do not put your name in a court filing unless you tell us to, and we do not contact your employer to check your story — not on that call, and not unless you decide to move forward.

The FLSA makes it unlawful to fire you, cut your hours, demote you, or otherwise discriminate against you because you filed a complaint or joined an overtime case.⁴ If a company does it anyway, that is a separate claim with its own damages. It makes the company’s position worse, not better. How far that protection reaches depends on what you did and where you work — which is a reason to ask before you act, not after.

Most of the people who call us are still on the payroll. You are allowed to ask a question without starting a war.

Nobody Tells You the Clock Is Running. It’s Running.

Federal overtime claims reach back two years. Three if the violation was willful.⁵ That window runs backward from the day the claim is filed, not from the day you were shorted. Every week you wait, a week of back pay drops off the far end and does not come back.

In a collective action, your clock does not stop until your own written consent is on file.⁶ Waiting for somebody else to go first costs you money.

Some state wage laws give you longer than federal law does. Check your state before you decide you are too late.

They Did It to His Mother First.

Jack Siegel grew up working-class on the north side of San Antonio. When he was 13, his father lost his job, and his mother, Susan, went to work at a CVS call center. She stayed 18 years. Then CVS let her go.

Years later he brought a case alleging CVS was not paying its call center representatives for required work before and after their shifts. He brought in named plaintiffs from all 15 call centers, litigated through the company’s arbitration defenses, pushed discovery to the edge of what CVS could still produce, and settled the case on behalf of more than 15,000 workers. His mother was one of them.

Here is the part that matters to you. Susan Siegel worked for years without knowing she was owed money. She was not naive and she was not careless. Nobody tells you. The arrangement works because almost nobody asks.

He opened Siegel Law Group in 2014 to do this and nothing else. The firm has never represented an employer. It never will.

“I might make more money off a future case, but doing that one for my mom? It’ll be the highlight of my career.”

— Jack Siegel, quoted in “More at Stake,” Super Lawyers

Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

More about the firm →

They Counted on You Not Asking. Ask.

Free, confidential, no obligation. Most calls run about fifteen minutes, and people hang up knowing where they stand.

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Phone(214) 790-4454

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AdmissionsJack L. Siegel is licensed in Texas, Bar No. 24070621. We bring FLSA and state wage claims in federal courts nationwide, with local counsel where a court requires it.

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Legal citations

This page is general information about federal overtime law. It is not legal advice about your situation.

29 U.S.C. § 207(a)(1) (overtime at one and one-half times the regular rate after 40 hours); 29 U.S.C. § 213(a)(1) (white-collar exemptions); 29 C.F.R. § 541.2 (a job title alone does not establish exempt status; the duties actually performed control).
29 C.F.R. § 541.200 (administrative exemption requires the exercise of discretion and independent judgment with respect to matters of significance).
Helix Energy Solutions Group, Inc. v. Hewitt, 598 U.S. 39 (2023) (holding that a daily-rate worker was not paid on a salary basis under 29 C.F.R. § 541.602(a), and so was not exempt); see 29 C.F.R. § 541.604(b) (a day-rate employee may still be exempt where the employer guarantees a weekly minimum bearing a reasonable relationship to the amount actually earned).
29 U.S.C. § 215(a)(3); remedies at § 216(b), including reinstatement, lost wages, and an additional equal amount as liquidated damages. See Kasten v. Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corp., 563 U.S. 1 (2011) (holding that an oral complaint may be protected where it is sufficiently clear and detailed, while reserving whether a complaint to a private employer is covered; the circuits differ).
29 U.S.C. § 255(a) (two years; three years for a willful violation).
29 U.S.C. § 256(b) (in a collective action, an individual’s action commences when written consent is filed with the court).