Dennis M. McClelland
Partner
Dennis is a solution-oriented Board Certified Labor and Employment Lawyer, with over 27 years of experience representing companies and executives. He regularly provides strategic consulting and compliance advice for single and multi-state employers, including on employment policies and practices, reductions-in-force, unionization and union-management relations, employment agreements, severance agreements, restrictive covenants, and trade secret protection. Dennis handles litigation involving labor and employment statutes, restrictive covenants, trade secrets, and employment-related torts in state and federal courts, in arbitration, and before government agencies. He and his team handle all types of cases, from single plaintiff to large, multi-state and national class/collective actions. He represents businesses across several industries, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. He also serves as a mediator for complex labor and employment cases.
Dennis regularly lectures on labor and employment law topics and has been a contributing editor for numerous legal treatises published by the American Bar Association and Bloomberg BNA, including the Fair Labor Standards Act, Wage and Hour Law: A State-by-State Survey, and Workplace Data. He has served on the board of editors for the Fair Labor Standards Act treatise for over 20 years, including five years as an editor-in-chief. Dennis served as the president of the Academy of Florida Management Attorneys, as a co-chair of the Federal Labor Standards Legislation Committee and FLSA Subcommittee of the ABA Labor & Employment Law Section, and is a fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers.
Experience
Wage and Hour
- Lead counsel in numerous FLSA individual and collective actions involving issues of coverage, independent contractor/employee status, off-the-clock work, compensatory time, exemption misclassification, and overtime rate computation. Matters have involved companies in numerous industries, including financial services (securities brokerage, trading, tax preparation, mortgage loan), retail (grocery, furniture), real estate, petroleum, health care (staffing, home health), call center, service, and hospitality (restaurants, valet, cruise).
- Lead counsel in numerous collective action cases involving allegations that call center employees were not properly compensated under federal and/or state law for certain pre- and post-shift activities.
- Lead counsel in numerous cases for companies in the hospitality industry involving the application of the tip credit rule.
- Lead counsel for national furniture company in FLSA collective action challenging the application of the Section 7(i) exemption to the company’s sales associates; putative class included hundreds of sales associates.
- Lead counsel for petroleum company in FLSA collective action in which assistant managers challenged application of the fluctuating workweek method of computing overtime compensation; putative class included hundreds of assistant managers.