Bank of America Wage and Hour Employment Practices Litigation

Pursuant to an order dated April 14, 2010, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation consolidated and transferred 12 actions from various courts throughout the United States to the District of Kansas. Plaintiffs in the consolidated proceedings allege that Bank of America is liable for unpaid wages and related penalties resulting from its alleged violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) and similar state laws in California and Washington. Bank of America denies these allegations and alleges it has policies in place to ensure its associates are properly compensated for all time worked.

Special Instructions

The CM/ECF system now permits the court and attorney users to file documents that include hyperlinks to legal citations and cross document references contained within the briefs they file.

The court would encourage the attorneys in In Re: Bank of America Wage and Hour Employment Practices Litigation, Case No: 10-md-2138-JWL to hyperlink your briefs and other significant filings to an electronic research service. In including hyperlinks in their documents before filing, attorneys allow judges, law clerks and other attorneys easier and more direct access to the legal citations and other document references that are associated with a filing rather than having to track the references down separately. Adding hyperlinks to a document is a simple process, which will make the total process easier and faster.

Cross-document references can be added in a few simple steps into a document previously filed in CM/ECF, a Word document or a Word Perfect document.

The court does not have a preference as to how this is done from a technical perspective or what service is used. However, to aid the parties, two guides demonstrating how to hyperlink briefs for Westlaw and Lexis/Nexis, respectively, are set forth below. Other electronic legal research services also appear to have the ability to hyperlink documents.

• Click here for instructions on the Westlaw program, West BriefTools.
• Click here for instructions on the LexisNexis program, Shepard's Brief Suite.
• Click here for instructions on adding cross-document references to previous filed documents.
• Hyperlinking General Information

Both Westlaw and LexisNexis offer programs that you can download for free to add hyperlinks to any citations quickly and easily: Westlaw BriefTools Website, LexisNexis Shephard's Brief Suite Website.

The Clerk's office would appreciate any feedback that you have regarding hyperlinking. Email us at ksd_mdl_feedback@ksd.uscourts.gov.