Reed Smith labor and employment partners Cindy Schmitt Minniti, John McDonald and Mark Goldstein discuss significant employment law updates, including the Department of Labor overtime rule being struck down, future expectations for non-compete agreements, anticipated reversals of National Labor Relations Board decisions and key upcoming Supreme Court cases. The partners also provide guidance on what employers should do before the end of Q1 2025. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Welcome to Disputes in Perspective, a Reed Smith podcast. This podcast series will discuss disputes-related trends, hot topics, and developments occurring in the global legal landscape, and hopefully provide you with some helpful insights and practical tips. If you have any questions about any of the episodes, please feel free to contact our speakers.  Cindy: Welcome back to Reed Smith's Disputes in Perspective podcast. Today's discussion will be around some of the key issues that will affect employers in the United States in 2025. My name is Cindy Schmitt Minniti, and I'm the global chair of Reed Smith Labor and Employment Group. I sit in New York office, and I'm joined today by two of my partners. I'll turn it over so they can introduce themselves. John: Hi, this is John McDonald. I'm also a partner at Reed Smith. I work out of the firm's Princeton, New Jersey office principally. Mark: Hi, everyone. Mark Goldstein, a partner in Reed Smith's New York office and also a member of our Labor and Employment Group. Cindy: Thank you both for joining me in this discussion today. The new year always brings an opportunity to review employment practices and HR policies and usually brings a host of new laws, new regulations, and new focus for administration. And this year, I think particularly given the new administration, employers should really be mindful of some significant changes from an employment law perspective. John, what do you think employers should be most aware of? John: Thank you, Cindy. I think one of the key things might be a slight reversal in time and looking forward after we had a very big decision out of the state of Texas, the very end of the year in 2024, which has been important for employers because they were facing another change in law that was supposed to go into effect on January 1st of 2025, which is now put off. So let me cover that briefly. As folks listening to this podcast may be aware, under the Federal Labor Standards Act, employers can pay employees via salary, and if they meet certain job duties and the salary is high enough, employers can treat those individuals as exempt from both overtime and minimum wage requirements. We often refer to the main exemptions, which are the executive, the professional and administrative exemptions, as the white-collar exemptions. Earlier in the year, the current administration through the Department of Labor, had put forth a proposed rule that raised the salary threshold for sex exemptions, first on July 1st, from where it currently sits at $35,568 per year, up to $43,888 a year. And that, again, went into effect on July 1st, even with the pendency of several legal challenges, which I'll get to in a minute. But there was supposed to be yet another increase on January 1st. Of 2025, all the way up to $58,656 a year. In November of this year, the Eastern District of Texas came out with a decision that invalidated this rule, such that even the July 1st raise that most employers had already been dealing with is now no longer the law. And the January 1st employees were expecting to the salary threshold will not go into it. So what that does is it currently means that the salary threshold for paying employees sufficient enough salary to avoid having to pay overtime provided they meet the requisite duties tests remains presently at the 2019 rule level of $35,568 per year. It was expected that these changes and these increases is we're going to sweep millions of additional employees into