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Melinda Arbuckle
Founding Partner
Melinda Arbuckle is a founding partner at Wage and Hour Firm, specializing in employment law and wage and hour litigation.12 She has over ten years of experience as an attorney, focusing primarily on wage and hour cases.2 Arbuckle received her Juris Doctor from Southern Methodist University's Dedman School of Law in 2011 and her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2008.1
Throughout her career, Arbuckle has held various positions in the legal field. She began as a federal law clerk for Judge W. Royal Furgeson in the Northern District of Texas.1 She then worked as an associate attorney at a prominent plaintiff law firm in Dallas before becoming a partner at a boutique employment law firm in Houston.1 In 2022, she co-founded Wage and Hour Firm with partner Rick J. Prieto.15
Arbuckle is board-certified in employment law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization.1 She has received several accolades for her work, including being named a "Rising Star" by Texas Super Lawyers.4 Her practice focuses on representing employees in various employment-related matters, including cases involving discrimination, wage theft, and other labor law violations.13
Highlights
A Wage and Hour Firm client had another great result today!
The Fifth Circuit (again) confirmed that our client was not paid on a salary basis and was entitled to overtime compensation. It held that an employer cannot call a paltry weekly amount of money a "salary" if it then pays an hourly rate for hours worked in a normal forty-hour workweek.
In particular, the Fifth Circuit disagreed with a recent opinion of the Tenth Circuit in a way that I find instructive:
"With all due respect to our sister circuit, we believe that Schlumberger overlooked the 'antecedent' question in Helix: whether the salary, regardless of the frequency with which it was distributed, provided a true weekly rate.
In our view, Helix and sections 602(a), 604(a), and 604(b) require courts to take a hard look at whether a purported 'salary' truly compensates employees for a week's worth of work or, instead, provides an artificial distinction between a salary and additional compensation."
You can read the opinion below.
We are excited to announce that our firm's website went live today. Please keep us in mind for any labor and employment legal issues.
