Commentary: Protect New York's small businesses by curbing predatory lawsuits

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Two sisters on Long Island thought they were serving Blizzards. Instead, they got buried in one.

Patty DeMint and Michelle Robey poured their savings into building a Dairy Queen franchise in Medford, Suffolk County. Then a 90-year-old law they’d never heard of turned their American dream into a legal nightmare.

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The sisters fired a problematic employee, who later sued them contending she was owed overtime pay. It soon spiraled into a class-action lawsuit over frequency of pay.

Class-action lawsuits are usually reserved for TV commercials about mesothelioma exposure or defective products. So how did a Dairy Queen on Long Island end up in one? Billboard lawyers had begun flooding Instagram with ads looking for anyone paid biweekly — like millions of Americans — who could claim they should have been paid weekly.

The sisters were sued for $6 million for paying their employees every two weeks instead of weekly. The so-called “frequency of pay” law, written during the Great Depression to prevent wage theft, requires “manual workers” to be paid weekly. No one ever told DeMint and Robey they were breaking it. Not their payroll company. Not state labor auditors.

The lawsuit threatened to put them out of business. Facing financial ruin, the sisters settled for $450,000; $305,000 went to the lawyers. The workers who sued got less than $200 each.

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That’s not justice. That’s exploitation by a legal system that rewards lawyers for gaming century-old laws most small-business owners have never heard of.

This isn’t an isolated case: After a 2019 court ruling expanded liability, New York was

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