The U.S. Supreme Court prevented a potential flood of litigation with last week's ruling in a case involving eligibility for overtime pay.

As we report on page 3, at issue in Michael Shane Christopher vs. SmithKline Beecham Corp. was whether a pharmaceutical sales representative was entitled to overtime pay. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act—a Depression-era law designed to prevent the exploitation of workers—employers are exempt from paying overtime to certain classes of employees. One of those classes consists of workers employed “in the capacity of outside salesman.”

The plaintiffs in the case had argued that since they actually don't close sales when trying to persuade physicians to prescribe their employer's products, they weren't actually salesmen. Both a district court and an appeals court rejected that reasoning. But matters grew more complicated when the U.S. Department of Labor filed an amicus brief in a different case in a different court maintaining that pharmaceutical sales representatives were not outside salesmen as defined by the act.

The high court rejected the idea that it should grant deference to the department's interpretation of its own rules issued long after the conduct at issue occurred. And by doing so, we believe the high court ruled correctly in its 5-4 decision.

Until that DOL amicus brief, filed in 2009, pharmaceutical companies had no reason to believe that their practice of treating the sales representatives as exempt from overtime was wrong. And the conduct at issue occurred over about four years in the middle of the decade. It is simply a matter of fairness that employers not be subject to what Associate Justice Samuel Alito called “unfair surprise” in the opinion he wrote for the court.

We couldn't agree more.

Perhaps more importantly, though, had the court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, other exemptions in the FLSA probably would have come under fire as well. The result would no doubt have been a flood of litigation by other currently exempt workers attempting to secure overtime pay. The decision may have been by the narrowest of margins, but its impact should be broadly felt indeed.