Jenkins v. Anton

• Decision Date: 29 April 2019
• Docket Number: No. 17-13073,17-13073
• Citation: 922 F.3d 1257
• Parties: Jennifer JENKINS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. S. David ANTON, PA, d.b.a. Anton Legal Group, S. David Anton, Individually, Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit

922 F.3d 1257

Jennifer JENKINS, Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.S. David ANTON, PA, d.b.a. Anton Legal Group, S. David Anton, Individually, Defendants-Appellees.

No. 17-13073

United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit.

April 29, 2019

Thomas A. Burns, Burns, PA, TAMPA, FL, Yvette Denise Everhart, Cynthia N. Sass, Law Offices of Cynthia N. Sass, PA, TAMPA, FL, for Plaintiff - Appellant

James Moten Thompson, Kathryn Comly Hopkinson, Thompson Legal Center, LLC, TAMPA, FL, Scott David Anton, Anton Legal Group, TAMPA, FL, for Defendants - Appellees

Before TJOFLAT, MARCUS, and, NEWSOM, Circuit Judges.

TJOFLAT, Circuit Judge:

Jennifer Jenkins worked as a paralegal for David Anton for about nine months. She had a flexible work schedule, and records of the hours she worked were not kept. After her employment ended, Jenkins sued Anton and his law firm for unpaid overtime wages under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The case was tried to the District Court, which entered judgment in favor of Anton. Jenkins moved for relief under Rule 59 and Rule 60 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Her motion was denied, and she appealed. On appeal, she says the District Court abused its discretion by denying relief under Rule 59 and Rule 60. She also argues that the Court misapplied the legal standard in ruling against her, and she claims the Court should have recused. We affirm.

We divide our discussion into three parts. First, we set out the evidence that was presented to the District Court during the bench trial. Second, we consider the arguments on appeal. Third, we conclude.

I.

We refer to Jenkins as "Employee" and Anton as "Employer" for convenience.

A.

The parties stipulated to a bench trial. Almost two weeks thereafter, Employee filed a notice of disclosure with the District Court. There, she notified the District Court that Employer had represented the District Judge’s ex-wife in the couple’s divorce proceedings. Employee never asked the District Judge to recuse, and he continued to preside over the case. The case proceeded to trial.

At trial, the parties told two very different stories. According to Employee, she typically arrived in the office by 8:15 a.m. and left sometime between 6:30 p.m. and midnight. She said she worked about 70 hours a week. Altogether, she claimed that she worked 711 hours of unpaid overtime. (This was a revised calculation; she originally claimed 1078.88 hours but reduced the number at trial after reviewing documents she received in discovery and after subtracting vacation-related time.) To support her claim for overtime, Employee introduced into evidence emails that she sent Employer after normal business hours and on weekends. She also argued that these emails were probably just a subset of all the emails she sent after hours. She didn’t have all of the emails because soon after she left the law firm, her successor deleted many of her emails.

Employer told a different story. He said that Employee originally agreed to work a fixed schedule. But the schedule became more flexible, according to Employer, because Employee took a lot of time off and worked later hours to make up the time. He didn’t keep a record of the hours she worked, but he testified that she never worked more than 40 hours a week. He gave a few reasons why he believed that. First, Employer said that Employee’s predecessor never worked "anywhere near 40 hours a week." (Employee’s predecessor did not testify, and that becomes important later.) Employee’s successor never worked overtime, either. Second, he explained that his practice was slow while Employee worked for him.¹ Third, he noted that he could see her office from his, and he saw her studying—not working—at times.²

Employer also addressed the emails that Employee sent after hours and on the weekends: he said it would not have taken Employee more than a few minutes to type those emails and to send them to him. They were short emails.

Other witnesses echoed Employer’s testimony. For example, the firm’s bookkeeper—who came in two days a week, four hours each day, the entire time Employee worked at the firm—never saw Employee working at a "harried pace." Nor did the bookkeeper ever notice Employee being pressed for time at work. In the bookkeeper’s opinion, there was not enough work at the firm to fill even 40 hours of Employee’s time each week. And Employee never told the bookkeeper that she was working overtime and should be paid for it, even though the bookkeeper was the one who told the payroll company how many hours each employee should be paid for, which Employee knew.

Another witness bolstered Employer’s testimony. This witness worked for a different lawyer, but she shared the same office space as Employee for three months. She said that Employee’s workload was "[n]ot particularly heavy"; most of the clients belonged to the lawyer she worked for and not Employer. And Employee did not work on matters related to those clients. The witness explained that her boss eventually left the firm, and Employer kept her on for a while. There was not enough client-related work to keep the witness busy, so Employer asked her to clean the office and to organize rooms. Employer eventually had to let the witness go because there was not enough work for her to do.

The same witness also replaced Employee when she left Employer’s law firm. Despite taking over all of Employee’s responsibilities, and despite having less paralegal experience than Employee, the witness did not work overtime for Employer.

Finally, Employer’s current paralegal testified. She said that Employer had about 15 active cases that she worked on. With that caseload—which was similar to Employer’s caseload while Employee worked for him—she had never worked overtime.³ In fact, the witness said, she didn’t even work 40 hours a week.

As is apparent from our discussion thus far, much of the testimony was pretty vague and generic. But the parties did testify more specifically about the work Employee did—or didn’t do—during an arbitration that Employer handled and Employee attended. The arbitration lasted four days, Tuesday through Friday. The parties agreed that Employee worked the Saturday and Sunday before the arbitration. But Employer said that Employee "took a lot of time off" during the normal workweek (Monday through Friday) that preceded the weekend. (As we explain below, it is important whether the hours Employee worked on Sunday count as part of her workweek for the week of the arbitration, or if they count as part of the prior workweek.) Employee claimed she worked "13 or 14 hours" the Monday before the arbitration.

As for the arbitration itself, each day had a three-hour morning session, followed by an hour-and-a-half lunch break, and a three-hour afternoon session. During lunch, Employer and Employee stayed at the facility and ate with their expert witness. Both parties agreed that they talked about the case during lunch. Employee testified that she worked "about 70 hours" or "[a] little over 70 hours"—like she did "most weeks"—the week of the arbitration.

B.

The District Court resolved the he-said-she-said swearing match in Employer’s favor. It concluded that Employer’s "testimony [was] more credible because it better matche[d] the other evidence ..., particularly the testimony of other employees." Based on this credibility determination, the Court found that Employee did not prove that she worked more than 40 hours in any given workweek.

The Court explained some of the evidence that supported Employer’s version of events. It noted that the firm billed fewer hours the year that Employee worked there than it did the two years before Employee came on and the year after she left. This was consistent with Employer’s claim that business was slower than normal while Employee worked for him. The Court also found that Employer’s description of his practice was consistent with the bookkeeper’s; the bookkeeper said that Employer’s practice was not busy compared to other lawyers she worked for, and she never noticed Employee rushing or working through lunch.

Employer’s version was also consistent with the testimony of Employee’s successor. The Court pointed out that Employer had the successor do "busy work" during the three months that she overlapped with Employee, and this was because Employee needed no help with paralegal work. The successor also said that the workload was light when she took over for Employee, and she never worked through lunch or on a weekend. And finally, Employer’s current paralegal testified that she never came close to working overtime.

The Court discounted the emails that Employee sent after normal business hours because many of them would have taken Employee no more than "two or three minutes to draft." Others were unrelated to work or asked for time off. The Court said the closest Employee came to proving that she worked overtime was the week of the arbitration. It found that the time Employee worked the Saturday before the arbitration did not make up for the time she took off earlier in the week. The Court said Employee’s claim that she worked late the Monday before the arbitration was "conclusory" because she didn’t identify any work she did. It also rejected Employee’s claim that the lunches during the arbitration were working lunches because she didn’t point to any work she did and said only that they talked about what happened during the morning sessions. And finally, Employee’s claim that she worked late nights during the arbitration suffered a similar fate: the Court rejected it because Employee didn’t identify any work she did.

Employee moved for relief under Rule 59 and Rule 60 based on several grounds. The District Court denied the motion, and Employee appealed. We explain below why the District Court denied relief under Rule 59 and Rule 60.

II.

Employee makes four arguments on appeal: (1) the District Court abused its discretion by denying relief under Rule 59, (2) the District Court abused its discretion by...