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Working with Outside Sales Persons in Oregon Cannabis

Outside sales people can be a great tool to sell your cannabis product. They may be invaluable to your company. In Oregon, outside sales people may be exempt from minimum wage and overtime requirements if certain requirements are met. Lately, we’ve seen more and more Oregon marijuana companies start working with outside sales people (sometimes called a “sales representative”, “account representative”, etc.) in order to get a leg up in the highly competitive Oregon industry.

As with any sort of employment-adjacent relationship, working with outside salespersons is covered by administrative rules, in this case through the Bureau of Labor and Industry (BOLI). As such, OAR 839-020-0005(4) defines an “Outside Sales Person” as:

an employee who is customarily and regularly engaged away from the employer’s place of business and the salesperson is employed for the purpose of making sales or obtaining orders or contracts for services or for use of facilities for which a consideration will be paid by the client or customer, and the person’s hours of work spent engaged in activities other than sales does not exceed 30 percent of the hours worked in the workweek by non-exempt employees of the employer.

That’s a mouthful: Let’s look at how that might work in practice. A producer could have an employee that travels to processors, wholesalers, or retail stores to induce them to buy the producer’s product. The employee may provide samples to the prospective buyer in accordance with Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC) rules, and induce them to enter into a contract to purchase the producer’s flower. If the employee is performing this type of work, outside of the producer’s farm a majority of the time, they may legally be qualified as an outside sales person. If so, minimum wage and overtime laws would not apply to the outside sales person.

For practical purposes, this means you would not be required to pay the outside sales person the current Oregon minimum wage of $10.75 per hour, nor would you be required to pay the sales person time and half for when the person works over 40 hours in a week. However, if you employ an outside sales person, you shouldn’t take this as permission to pay them less than the current minimum wage. The exemption exists for outside sales persons because they are typically paid commission wages. Commission wages is typically a percentage of sales. If an outside sales person is unable to enter into enough contracts to obtain minimum wage based on their commission status, the exemption is there to protect employers from having to supplement their wages to ensure they are receiving minimum wage.

Because we are talking cannabis, things are more complicated, of course, especially where a cannabis employer chooses to pay an employee commission wages instead of hourly wages. Under OLCC rules, any employee that receives commission payments is considered a person with a “financial interest” in the business. Persons with a financial interest in a cannabis business must be disclosed to the OLCC, and in certain circumstances, the OLCC may require the person to undergo a background check.

What the take-away from this information? An outside sales person can be a great employee to have as a cannabis business in Oregon. In certain circumstances, you may not be required to pay the employee minimum wage, and instead, create a commission structure for the employees wages. However, before this is done, the employee should be disclosed to the OLCC as a person with a financial interest in the business. If you are ever unsure if an employee qualifies as an outside sales person or needs to be disclosed to the OLCC, it’s always best to consult an attorney before making any changes that could have legal consequences. And it’s very important to have the scope of the relationship in writing, in order to protect your business from BOLI and other claims.

source https://www.cannalawblog.com/working-with-outside-sales-persons-in-oregon-cannabis/

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Marijuana Business Litigation Decision Making

When people have been wronged, they naturally want to get justice and want the party that wronged them to pay enough money to make them whole. The law generally holds that when someone commits a tort or breaches a contract against you, they owe you an amount of money equal to the value of your damages suffered because of the tort or contract breach. Unfortunately, getting justice isn’t so simple. The general order of events is as follows. The defendant breaches its contract with you, and you make a personal demand to the defendant to either cure the breach or pay you for the breach. The defendant ignores you, so you hire an attorney to send a demand letter. The defendant either ignores the letter or has its attorney send a response back disclaiming liability. You then must decide whether to continue making demands or whether to pursue more aggressive action, including filing a lawsuit.

This is a challenging time, as emotions run high. In the cannabis industry, so many entrepreneurs are working on a shoe-string budget and have significant portions of their savings tied up in an already risky industry. Of course you don’t want to ignore the contract breach or tort and let the defendant get away with its actions. But you also don’t want to throw good money after bad money in a quest for vengeance. Just because you have been wronged doesn’t mean that you have a legally actionable claim, or that the defendant’s bad acts proximately caused your damages, or that the defendant doesn’t have counterclaims against you.

Instead, you have to remove yourself sufficiently from the emotions of the situation to determine what to do in an unbiased way. Here is a simplified formula that can help guide that decision-making process:

(W% * D * AP%) — ((DCW% * CD) + AF + IC)

Here’s how we break that down:

W%: Chance of winning litigation

D: Realistic damages estimate, based on provable verifiable damages

AP%: Percentage of award defendant could pay based on defendant’s cash holdings and other assets

DCW%: Chance of defendant winning a counterclaim

CD: Damages estimate of defendant’s counterclaim

AF: Your expected attorney fees, expert witness fees, and other costs related to litigation.

IC: Your indirect litigation costs (stress, time missed from your business, negative effect on business relationships, etc.)

If the equation equals a positive number, it probably makes sense to file a claim. If the equation equals a negative number, it is probably better to let the matter go, or seek alternative claim resolution.

The hard part, of course, is filling in the details. This is where it pays off to have good attorneys that have the experience necessary to come up with smart and reasonable answers for these variables, and the integrity to answer them honestly instead of in a way that leads to them generating fees with your losing case. If your lawyer tells you that you have a 100% chance of winning any case, fire that lawyer immediately. There are no guarantees in litigation. If your lawyer tells you that you have a 0% chance of winning the case, your attorney is either overly cautious, or your case is really that bad (suing a pedestrian that you ran over in a crosswalk for your tire damage bad). On the damages side, you really are looking for measurable, provable damages that have some basis in objectivity.

We often go through this process with our clients, and it doesn’t always feel good for the clients. You’re paying your attorney a lot of money for personal service, and it can feel like your attorney is doubting everything you say. If you’re going to make smart decisions about litigation, though, you have to go through the exercise. You want to see all the holes in your case before you file that first complaint. All cases are different, but even small cases that look relatively simple can generate well over six figure in legal fees and costs, and turn on a point of law that seemed insignificant at first. If your attorney is pushing you into litigation without communicating the inherent chance involved, be cautious.

Finally, for marijuana businesses specifically, the indirect litigation costs variable has to include any potential losses you can face from your dispute going public. This comes up all the time when we have ownership disputes. These disputes often stem from one or more owners causing the business to commit regulatory violations. Sometimes these regulatory violations have not been uncovered and could lead to large fines or license cancellation. In cases like that, you absolutely need to quantify your risk exposure before pulling the trigger.

For more on cannabis business litigation, see our archive here.

source https://www.cannalawblog.com/marijuana-business-litigation-decision-making/

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