10-3009 Verkuilen v. MediaBank, LLC

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Employment
FLSA; overtime

An account manager for a software company is not entitled to overtime.

“The account manager is not a salesman for Best Buy or a technician sitting at a phone bank fielding random calls from her employer’s customers—instead she’s on the customer’s speed dial during the testing and operation of the customer’s MediaBank software. As the intermediary between employees of advertising agencies struggling to master complex software and the software developers at MediaBank, she has to spend much of her time on customers’ premises training staff in the use of the software, answering questions when she can and when she can’t taking them back to MediaBank’s software developers, and then explaining their answers to the customer and showing the customer how to implement the answers in its MediaBank software. Identifying customers’ needs, translating them into specifications to be implemented by the developers, assisting the customers in implementing the solutions—in the words of MediaBank’s chief operating officer, account managers are expected to ‘go out, understand [the customers’ requirements], build specifications, understand the competency level of our customers. Then they will build functional and technical specifications and turn it over to . . . developers who will then build the software, . . . checking in with the account manager, making sure what they are building is ultimately what the customer wanted.’”
Affirmed.

10-3009 Verkuilen v. MediaBank, LLC

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Grady, J., Posner, J.

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