Plaintiff's overtime lawyers love class warfare. A well-written overtime lawsuit always asks the court to create a class of your current and ex-employees to sue you as a group. Lawyers call that an overtime collective action. It's deadly—plaintiff's lawyers leverage the high potential liability to broker class-wide settlements with eye-popping dollars.

One way to curb the problem is to break up these classes before they form. A plaintiff's lawyer is less likely to aggressively pursue an single employee's overtime claim against you because the lawyer's up-side is much smaller. Employee arbitration programs may let you duke out an overtime dispute mano y mano.

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