Oil and Gas - The Mother of Inflation - GineersNow Petroleum magazine

NEWS
Jury Says Offshore Rig Clerks
are Independent Contractors in
High Stakes Trial For Chamberlain
Hrdlicka Client - New Tech Global
In a worker classification case with significant
implications for the oil and gas industry, a
jury seated in the U.S District Court for the
Western District of Louisiana, Lafayette
Division took a little over an hour to find that
a group of rig clerks working on offshore oil
rigs were independent contractors rather than
employees of New Tech Global, an oilfield
services company that processed invoices for
the plaintiff rig clerks.
Plaintiffs brought the action under the Fair
Labor Standards Act (FLSA), initially as a
class action, which was later decertified by
the court and limited to the three individuals
who filed the lawsuit. The rig clerks asserted
that they were employees of New Tech Global
(NTG), a Houston-based upstream oil and
gas consultancy services company. NTG was
represented in the matter by Annette Idalski,
lead counsel, and Peter Hall, both shareholders
of Chamberlain Hrdlicka; associate Kyle
Winnick, also with Chamberlain Hrdlicka; and
Donna Currault of Gordon, Arata, Montgomery,
Barnett, McCollam, Duplantis & Eagan, LLC,
who served as local counsel.
The NTG defense team successfully
demonstrated that the plaintiffs were
independent contractors rather than employees
and that they were in no way “economically
dependent” on NTG. Evidence was presented
showing that each plaintiff could cease running
invoices through NTG with no financial penalty
and were free to contract at any time with a
different invoice company. All three plaintiffs,
outside of their invoice servicing relationship
with NTG, had formed their own businesses,
writing off “hundreds of thousands of dollars”
in business expenses – incurred during
periods they claimed to be NTG employees.
Two of the plaintiffs’ corporations employed
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