Christopher v. SmithKline Beecham Corp.
United States Supreme Court
567 U.S. 142 (2012)
SmithKline (defendant) employed detailers like Christopher and Buchanan (plaintiffs) to visit doctors and secure nonbinding commitments to prescribe SmithKline drugs, a practice standard across the pharmaceutical industry since the 1950s; the detailers worked largely unsupervised in the field, earned substantial base pay plus sales-volume-based incentive pay ($72,000-$76,000 annually), and received no overtime pay, prompting their FLSA overtime lawsuit. The lower courts granted SmithKline summary judgment finding the detailers exempt as outside salesmen, and the Supreme Court granted certiorari, with the DOL having only in 2009 first taken the contrary position that detailers didn't qualify for the exemption.
Whether a pharmaceutical sales representative whose primary duty is securing nonbinding commitments from doctors to prescribe drugs, rather than completing binding sales transactions, qualifies as an exempt outside salesman under the FLSA, and whether deference is owed to a Department of Labor interpretation adopted only decades after the industry practice began.