Getting Paid What You Earned
The law is on your side when it comes to getting paid. Things like overtime, meal and rest breaks, expense reimbursements, and pay for every minute worked are just the beginning of what your employer legally owes you. When they fall short, the penalties are serious. Most employees are owed more than they know. Lion Law is how they find out.
Does this sound like your workplace?
If what you see here reflects your experience—or something at work simply feels wrong—trust that feeling. It's often the beginning of a case.
The law requires overtime pay when you work more than forty hours in a week. In California, the protection goes further—overtime kicks in after eight hours in a single day. When employers manipulate timesheets, pressure employees to work off the clock, or simply don't pay what's owed, every unpaid hour is a violation. The records of what was worked and what was paid are almost always there. We know how to get them.
Breaks aren't a favor—they're a legal right. California requires most employers to provide a thirty-minute meal break for shifts over five hours and a ten-minute rest break for every four hours worked. When those breaks are denied, interrupted, or quietly discouraged, the employer owes one hour of pay for each violation. We make sure every one of them is accounted for.
The law sets strict deadlines for when wages must be paid—and California goes further than most states in penalizing employers who miss them. A final paycheck withheld after termination, wages held back without justification, or a consistently late payment schedule all carry real legal consequences. The recovery is often more than the original amount owed.
In California, the vacation and PTO you earn is treated as wages—it accrues, it's yours, and it must be paid out when you leave a job. How time off is calculated and what happens to it can vary depending on your employer and where you work. But the core principle holds: earned time off cannot simply be taken away. If you're not sure whether you received everything you were owed, that's worth exploring.
If a company controls how, when, and where you work, the law may consider you an employee—regardless of what your contract says. California's standard for determining employment status is one of the strictest in the country, and workers treated as independent contractors are often entitled to overtime, breaks, expense reimbursements, and more. What you were called on paper doesn't determine what you're owed. The reality of how you worked does.
The law requires employers to reimburse employees for necessary work expenses—mileage, phone usage, equipment, home office costs, and more. When companies treat those costs as the employee's problem, the law disagrees. This includes remote workers who absorbed the cost of doing their job from home. The amount that accumulates over time is recoverable—and the obligation to reimburse it was never optional.