FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act)

The federal law establishing minimum wage, overtime pay, recordkeeping, and child labor standards for covered employees. FLSA collective actions are among the most commonly funded employment matters because wage and hour claims across large workforces produce predictable, calculable damages tied to hours worked and pay differentials. Funders evaluate whether the employer's pay practices were systemic and whether the plaintiff class is large enough to justify litigation economics.

Because FLSA damages are calculable directly from payroll records — hours worked, applicable rate, violation period — funders treat wage claims as some of the most tractable employment matters to underwrite, with far less reliance on jury sympathy than a discrimination case requires. The main underwriting variable is workforce scale: funders model expected collective size and per-employee damages together, since a systemic pay practice affecting a few dozen employees rarely clears the economics that make third-party financing worthwhile.