A “Senior Professional Sales Representative” who elaborated on the “independent and managerial qualities that her position required” and was responsible to form a strategic plan designed to maximize sales in her territory was an exempt administrative employee under the Fair Labor Standards Act and thus not entitled to overtime payments for her work, the Third Circuit rules.

The sales position required travel to various doctors’ offices and hospitals where the employee extolled the benefit of her company’s pharmaceutical drug to the prescribing doctors, but did not sell the controlled substance directly to the doctors. Her employer provided a list of target doctors that it created and told her to complete an average of ten visits per day, visiting every doctor on her target list at least once each quarter. The Court notes that to schedule visits with reluctant doctors, the employee “ had to be inventive and cultivate relationships with the doctor’s staff, an endeavor in which she found that coffee and donuts were useful tools.” The itinerary and order of her visits to the target doctors were left to her discretion. She could choose to visit “high-priority doctors” more frequently, and the company gave her a budget for these visits where she could use the money to take the doctors to lunch or to sponsor seminars, the Court observes. According to her job description, she was required to plan and prioritize her responsibilities in a manner that maximized business results.

The Court decides that the requirement for the employee to develop a strategic plan for her sales “satisfied the ‘directly related to the management or general business operations of the employer’ provision of the administrative employee exemption because it involved a high level of planning and foresight, and the strategic plan that [the employee] developed guided the execution of her remaining duties.” Smith v. Johnson & Johnson