If you follow employment law (and who the heck doesn’t?), you’ve seen recent lawsuits alleging wage and hour violations by interns, cheerleaders, minor league baseball players, and a host of others. In each of these, I’m sure that the employers at some point told their lawyers that they’ve always done it this way.

As the title of this post points out, that isn’t a defense. It’s more like an admission.

Managers are busy with a million different things. Evaluating whether pay practices are consistent with current legal requirements is usually treated as a fairly low priority. That is, until someone files a claim, then more people file claims or maybe a government agency starts investigating. Then it becomes a huge priority.

If you want a brief summary of the laws that most often trip up employers with operations in California, we’ve prepared this guide. If you’re an employer and you’re not in compliance, it’s far cheaper, less stressful, and less time consuming to fix the problem before you’re involved in adversarial proceedings.