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Key Takeaways
ARTICLE | Macro Legal/Compliance Roundup (Part II) Supreme Court 2024/2025 Term Advanced Look
The Supreme Court 2023/2024 term began on Monday, October 7th, and will run until Sunday, October 5th, 2025, although most of the work is done when the Court recesses in late June or early July.
Last week, we covered some of the most impactful and relevant judicial and regulatory developments that occurred during the last Supreme Court term, but with the presidential election just a few weeks away and with significant uncertainty surrounding federal regulatory review as a result of recent Court decisions, how federal regulators will operate and who will be setting their priorities remains very much up in the air at the moment.
Much of the Supreme Court calendar, on the other hand, has been set, and while there are likely to be changes to the schedule as the year progresses should pressing legal uncertainties emerge, much of the docket is set.
While the Court will take up a number of interesting issues over the course of the term including cases involving e-cigarette marketing, air traffic controller emergency pay, and gender-affirming medical care for minors, in this piece we’ll review some of the most significant and impactful cases involving business and labor issues that the Supreme Court is hearing this term.
This case deals with how hospitals are reimbursed for servicing low-income patients.
A group of over 200 hospitals is arguing that the Department of Health and Human Services is misinterpreting the law and depriving them of additional reimbursement owed by the federal government.
In calculating Medicare fee reimbursement rates - specifically the disproportionate share hospital adjustment due to hospitals that service a large portion of low-income patients - the formula is based in part on how many of the hospital’s patients are “entitled to SSI benefits.”
The hospitals argue that all patients who are enrolled in an SSI program should qualify, even if they don’t currently receive benefits, while the HHS argues that only patients who qualify for the monthly SSI payment at the time of their hospital stay should be deemed “entitled to SSI benefits” in accordance with the law.
Thus far, the US District Court sided with the HHS interpretation and the Court of Appeals affirmed that decision, but it remains to be seen how the Supreme Court will interpret the issue.
This case addresses trademark infringement and corporate affiliate structure.
Two separate companies offering similar services in a similar industry, one in Georgia and one in Virginia, have been involved in a nearly two-decade-long dispute over the use of the name Dewberry.
In 2017, Dewberry Group began offering services under sub-brands called Dewberry Living, Dewberry Office, and Studio Dewberry, which Dewberry Engineers claims is a trademark infringement and/or a violation of a previous settlement agreement.
The District Court sided with Dewberry Engineers and ordered Dewberry Group to pay $43 million in profits obtained as a result of the infringement, but Dewberry Group is arguing to the Supreme Court that the District Court wrongly held Dewberry Group liable for the actions of legally separate affiliates that were not named in the case.
In this case, the Supreme Court tackles the question of what standard of evidence is required for an employer to prove the applicability of an exemption to the Fair Labor Standards Act.
A food distributor called E.M.D. claimed that overtime pay was not owed to their commission-based sales representatives because those sales representatives fell under the “outside sales” exemption of the FLSA.
Those sales representatives, who are the plaintiffs in this case, claim that their job was not primarily sales-oriented, however, but was largely incidental to sales made by others at the corporate level.
The District Court agreed with the case presented by the sales representatives and was affirmed by the Appeals Court, but now the Supreme Court will decide whether employers must prove with clear and convincing evidence that the outside sales exemption should apply in a given instance, or if employers must merely prove that their sales representatives meet the outside sales exception to the FLSA by a preponderance of the evidence, which is a lower standard than clear and convincing evidence.
Should the Supreme Court overturn the lower court rulings, employers will have a lower hurdle to clear in proving the outside sales exemption applies in order to avoid paying overtime in these circumstances.
This case involves the question of whether risk disclosures are false or misleading if they omit reference to risks that have actually materialized in the past but pose no known current, ongoing, or future risk.
Facebook shareholders sued Facebook following the public release of information indicating that Facebook had been sharing user data with third parties without user consent, which damaged the value of Facebook stock.
Several years earlier, another somewhat similar scandal involving a third party accessing user data without consent had unfolded, and although that incident had supposedly been resolved when that third party supposedly deleted said data, Facebook had apparently known for years that the data had not in fact been deleted and was still being used by the third party.
The District Court dismissed the case but the Court of Appeals reversed that decision and determined that the shareholders’ pleadings had adequately claimed falsity in some of Facebook’s risk assessments, and now it’s up to the Supreme Court to dismiss the case or send it back to District Court for trial.
In this case, the Court will take a look at the question of whether a former employee loses the right to sue their former employer under the Americans With Disabilities Act with regard to discrimination in the dispensation of benefits once the employee no longer works for the employer.
The plaintiff worked as a firefighter for nearly two decades before retiring following a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. When the plaintiff began working as a firefighter, the city policy was to provide healthcare to former workers who retired as a result of disability until they were 65 years of age. Several years later that policy was changed to provide only 2 years of healthcare for former employees who retire as a result of disability, and the plaintiff sued her employer to obtain the benefits she understood would be available to her at the time she accepted the job shortly before those benefits were set to expire under the updated policy.
The District Court sided with the city, and the Appellate Court affirmed that decision, noting that plaintiffs bringing lawsuits under Title I of the ADA must hold a position or desire to hold a position at the defendant’s organization at the time of the alleged wrongdoing.
The Supreme Court will weigh in next, and the case may turn on whether the alleged wrongdoing is deemed to be the unjust revocation of the original policy when the plaintiff was still an employee, or sometime after. That is, if the Court finds any wrongdoing at all.
Here, the Supreme Court will answer the question as to whether making a false statement to a certain financial institution and federal regulators can include misleading statements and/or omissions that are not necessarily false.
In this case, the defendant took out 3 separate loans with a bank that subsequently failed and was taken over by federal regulators. When those regulators attempted to collect the debt owed, the defendant only acknowledged his first loan but neglected to mention his other two loans, which regulators only later discovered.
The jury trial that convicted the defendant lasted less than a week and the Appellate court affirmed.
And while not directly related to business, given the stakes involved and the mutual consent of the governed that citizens collectively supply, it may be worth keeping in mind a couple of cases with defendants that are currently slated for execution should their appeals not result in intervention of some sort.
In Glossip v. Oklahoma, the Supreme Court will decide whether the Oklahoma state government is allowed to execute a convicted felon when the prosecutors no longer support the capital sentence and when the case involves multiple errors and instances of prosecutorial misconduct.
In Gutierrez v. Saenz, the Supreme Court will decide whether an inmate on death row has standing to sue the state government of Texas for a law that only gives the inmate access to DNA testing if they can prove that they would not have been convicted if the DNA test results were exculpatory.
For three days a week, two weeks a month over the next 6 months, the Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments on these and other cases, shaping the legal landscape of the United States a little in each instance - sometimes with very minor specific repercussions and sometimes with major, broadly sweeping repercussions.
While many of the cases the Court will hear during the term may have little relevance outside of legal procedure and court administration, there are several cases with the potential to greatly impact various aspects of American life, business, and government.
Oftentimes, however, it is not easy to predict the size and scope of the impact any given decision may have as a result of all of the secondary, ripple effects that can be difficult to identify, let alone calculate.
Also, there isn’t always a particularly strong correlation between how much media coverage a given case receives and the potential size of the impact that the ultimate judicial decision may have.
For example, in the most recent Supreme Court term that concluded last week, the presidential immunity case garnered significantly more headlines than Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve system, but the former case only directly affects the law as it is applied to a small group of people (US presidents) while the latter affects the ability of every person and legal entity to potentially challenge any piece of federal regulation.
Which decisions this term will ultimately have the largest and most lasting impacts remains to be seen, and if the presidential election of 2020 is any guide, there’s a fair chance that some of the most impactful and media-heavy legal disputes have not yet arisen and won’t be on the docket for at least a month.
Other than emergency interventions, the Supreme Court won’t start releasing decisions on these cases until next summer, but we will keep you updated as relevant developments and issues come up in the meantime on the monthly Legal/Compliance series which can be found here.
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