The legal landscape involving independent contractors has dramatically and swiftly changed. For decades, legal challenges to an employer’s use of independent contractors were infrequent, and many companies were willing to risk the remote chance that they would have to defend a lawsuit or a regulatory inquiry that they had misclassified certain employees as independent contractors.
Over the last year, however, there has been a wave of regulatory and legislative initiatives at both the federal and state levels seeking to stem the use of independent contractors. In addition, companies have been faced with substantial judgments in highly visible lawsuits brought on behalf of classes of workers who have successfully established that they were common law employees improperly classified by their employers as independent contractors.
