HONOLULU - Attorney General Mark Bennett announced today that the State of Hawai'i has filed a complaint against McKesson Corporation and First DataBank, Inc., as part of an ongoing effort to recover for what the State believes were prescription drug overcharges to the State.  The State's previous related lawsuit recovered (in total) more than $82 million from prescription drug manufacturers.

Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell has filed a lawsuit in East Baton Rouge Parish District Court alleging that 18 drug companies have ripped off state taxpayers by overcharging the Medicaid program. The suit says that the companies misreported their drug prices in a deliberate effort to increase the payments they receive from the Louisiana Medicaid system. Block Law Firm of Thibodaux and Beasley, Allen, Crow Methvin, Portis & Miles of Montgomery, Ala., signed the suit, along with Caldwell. Beasley Allen is among the nation's leading plaintiffs firms. Attorneys working on this case from Beasley Allen are W. Daniel Miles, III, head of the firm's Consumer Fraud Section, Roman Shaul, and Alison Douillard.

Our firm has recently settled three significant FLSA cases on a class wide (collective action) basis, providing employees of those companies with back wages that they were wrongfully denied as a result of labor abuses. While each company's labor violations differed slightly, each involved a common theme we continue to see in these labor abuse cases. That common theme is where employers intentionally misclassify employees as managers and independent contractors in order to escape paying overtime pay.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a $35.6 million judgment against Family Dollar Stores Inc. originally handed down by a Tuscaloosa, Ala., federal jury in 2006. The jury said the company violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by wrongly classifying employees as store managers in order to deny them overtime pay.