Lorie Almon Quoted in Law360
“Huffington Post Blogger Suit Lacks Merit, Attys Say”

National Wage and Hour Litigation practice group Co-Chair Lorie Almon was quoted in an April 15 Law360 article regarding a class-action suit recently filed against The Huffington Post. In the case, bloggers claim that their unpaid work for the Post increased its monetary value in a recent sale to AOL Inc. The bloggers, led by labor activist Jonathan Tasini, want to be compensated for adding value to the company.

“My sense is that Mr. Tasini will have an uphill battle in surviving a motion to dismiss,” Lorie surmised. “The suit certainly raises a clever theory, but I think that he's going to have difficulty proving certain elements of an unjust enrichment claim.”

Lorie went on to remark that while the complaint alleges that The Huffington Post was unjustly enriched by the bloggers' contributions, it fails to satisfy the requirement that this enrichment was at the expense of the bloggers, who knowingly submitted their content with no expectation of receiving any type of monetary compensation.

“There's no question that the evolution of technology and of how people work necessarily leads to some rethinking of how traditional law applies in the ever-changing workplace,” Almon commented. “FLSA law was written for a different type of economy, and the way people work today raises a whole host of legal issues around the traditional employer-employee relationship.”