The Combined Claims Conference (CCC) has emerged as one of the largest and most diverse educational conferences in the industry. For 30 years now, it has brought together top claim professionals from insurance companies, brokerages and agencies – along with service providers – from throughout the Western U.S. The most recent edition of the conference took place March 6-7 in Anaheim, California, and Berman, Berman, Berman, Schneider & Lowary LLP (B3SL) — through a well-visited booth and its role as a Level 1 “Platinum” sponsor — was once again an active participant.

On March 5, 2018, the California Supreme Court issued its long-awaited decision on the method for calculating an employee’s overtime rate when an employee has earned a flat sum bonus during a single sum pay period. In Alvarado v. Dart Container Corporation of California (2018) 4 Cal. 5th 542, the Supreme Court ruled that the value of the flat sum bonus is determined by dividing the amount of the bonus by the total number of non-overtime hours actually worked during the relevant pay period and using 1.5, not .5, as the multiplier for determining the employee’s overtime pay rate.

In the past, liability of a product was limited to only those entities within the stream of commerce. A new California Supreme Court case, T.H. v. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation (2017) 4 Cal. 5th 145, has recently allowed a cause of action to proceed when a seller’s product was not actually the one used by a plaintiff.