Carolyn D. Richmond was quoted in Restaurant
Business' article, "The Trouble with Tips." Full
text can be found in the June 16, 2014, issue, but a synopsis is
below.
More frequently, restaurant owners have been removing their tip
jars from counters in anticipation of recent legislative campaigns
to shrink tip credit.
Fox Rothschild hospitality attorney Carolyn Richmond comments,
"Restaurants have opened a Pandora's box for plaintiff
lawyers." Although tipping laws have existed the restaurant
industry for decades, the laws were so complicated that restaurant
owners leniently observed and enforced them.
Richmond continues to say, "Lawyers started realizing that
class-action wage-and-hour lawsuits are more lucrative and less
labor intensive than traditional discrimination suits. There's
a whole panoply of other laws that nobody had paid attention to,
like tipping and service charges, minutiae that didn't affect
other industries."
