ADP Drops Lawsuit Against Human Resources Startup Zenefits | Hacker News Reader

ADP Drops Lawsuit Against Human Resources Startup Zenefits

techcrunch.com

111 pointstim_sw27 comments

the legal system is really complicated to an outsider[0]. lets look at these two qoutes:

> The legacy payroll company ADP on Tuesday dropped its defamation lawsuit against ... competitor, Zenefits.

and this

> in a major victory for the startup, a U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice

While I understand how appeals work, this does seem contradictory. ADP decided to drop the lawsuit. ADP was told their case sucked and had it thrown out. I understand how this works, but reading the title it looked like a voluntary act, reading the article it looked like the only option. this was pretty much gradeschool bullying and name calling sorted out by a very stern principal and a few teachers who likely cost/charged millions in aggregate.

[0] while this is true of all systems, it seems to be a greater extent with the law. which is fucked up, as everyone needs the law to be more clear.

As far as I can tell, the second quote from the article is incorrect. The lawsuit was not dismissed with prejudice (which is a legal term that means the judge issued a ruling dismissing the lawsuit without ability to re-file).

Instead, there was a hearing on Zenefit's motion to dismiss, the judge indicated during the hearing that ADP's case wasn't going to fly, and ADP "voluntarily" withdrew before the judge issued an official ruling dismissing the case.

It's also possible, but rare, for a judge to refuse a voluntary request to withdraw a suit; typically, this is because the judge intends to rule to dismiss with prejudice (they can't re-file). It's only really seen in states with strong anti-SLAPP protections against lawsuits designed to bully rather than resolve a grievance (hence the acronym, Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation).

What is a "legacy payroll company?" As far as I can tell, ADP is online too.

I think the phrase is used in this context

  The dispute began in June when ADP, a 50-year-old payroll company,

Deleted comment

Huh? I've been using ADP's online 'portal' for over 2 years - no idea how long it existed before then. Is there a specific part of the service that they expanded to be online this year?

My payroll info was online with ADP in 2000.

Sorry I have limited knowledge of the industry. I remember getting online services (iPay) from ADP back in 2011. I assume you're talking about a different online component?

Umm, the place I've been working at uses them for 401k, payroll, etc with online portals since 2011 when we moved away from a different legacy payroll company that also had that sort of stuff since ~2000.

I think you are just mistaken and/or a feature important to you was online added this year.

That is complete bullshit. As others have stated, it has been around for a couple of years.

Serious question: Is Zenefits providing much value for anyone here that uses it?

Not to us. It's mostly a nice UI on top of the same old horrible healthcare system. When you submit the form, I guess it sends an email to somebody who does everything manually.

When we signed up with Zenefits, they did a mistake for 4 employees out of 9 and it took 6 months to fix things. I missed an important treatment because I didn't have the right plan and it didn't cover what I needed. Zenefits told us it was Blueshield's fault, and... as you can guess, Blueshield said it was Zenefit's mistake.

Similar experience at my company. Lots of mistakes, almost certainly due to things being done by hand behind the scenes. We stopped using them after too many mistakes involving people's paychecks.

The start-up I'm at uses it. While I can't speak for the administrative side of things as far as using it as an employee it's way easier than the typical HR paperwork bullshit you have to do. Everything is in one place, all my paperwork, insurance sign-up, direct deposit and employment agreement all through one website. I had to print and fill out zero papers which that by itself is such a relief at least for me.

Personally I value accuracy over speed when it comes to important legal docs. Read too many horror stories about bad data entry with Zenefits to trust things will get done right. Double the headache of a "legacy" provider if these things are done incorrectly.

Fair enough; I've read some of those stories but we haven't had an issue like that as far as I know. Naturally you're going to hear the bad more frequently than the good so I'm not convinced it's a huge problem but it's obviously an issue.

As a foreign founder who went through the complexity of setting up "legacy" hr/benefits/etc in another country, Zenefits was a huge aid in navigating the bureaucratic nightmare in the US.

Yes - it is way better than the previous broker we used. It has automated all of our offers, on-boarding, etc.

It's the best HR tool I've experienced and free. That's a pretty good combination.

Yes. If you've ever tried to use a broker for benefits or another system for onboarding or another system for payroll... Night and day difference. Much easier to use. Much better to have it all in one place. Love the Zenefits + Zenpayroll combo.

There was a comment in the post from Scott Yates I found to be insightful. Apparently he's a customer of both ADP and Zenefits and felt the effects first hand.

https://www.blogmutt.com/blog/adp-and-zenefits-end-their-sil...

I can't add more to the conversation, but I found it added another (more interesting) angle to the situation.

Thanks for the mention! I had a lot of fun writing that.

The article didn't make it clear... has Zenefits regained access to ADP's systems?

Zenefits feels like one of those Unicorns that will go poof. I find employee satisfaction and turnover in startups to be important signs of the health of a startup and Glassdoor reviews are terrible and turnover looks high via LinkedIn

What a waste of money. Such gnashing of teeth over nothing. Now Zenefits should drop ADP.

When this happened we ditched ADP for ZenPayroll - wasn't that hard. Now ZenPayroll and Zenefits are fighting.

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