Wage-Hour Audits: Lessons Learned From Chipotle’s Heartburn

Beloved burrito-maker Chipotle Mexican Grill has found itself in a situation messier than the finger foods that brought the company more than $4 billion in revenue last year. A magistrate judge in Scott v. Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. recently ordered that a report prepared by a human resources consultant, Cinda Daggett, is not protected by the attorney-client privilege because she wasn’t an agent of the law firm Chipotle hired back in 2011 to assess whether its Apprentices and Assistant Managers should be paid overtime. The report, or “job function analysis,” examines the work lives of a handful of Apprentices to, in the words of a Chipotle compensation analyst, “get a really good understanding of what Apprentices do in their day-to-day jobs” and provide the law firm “information on the ground so that they could give us an opinion on what we were asking.”

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