My mother always warned me about the dangers of following the crowd:

“If all your friends jumped off a cliff,” she’d ask, “would you follow them? Don’t be a lemming!”

Lemmings, it turns out, don’t really commit mass suicide by hurling themselves en masse off cliffs, but I got the point. Doing things the same way as everyone else isn’t always a good idea, and it may create legal problems.

Eight years ago, a number of backstretch workers in New York sued prominent Thoroughbred trainer Nick Zito and the Nicholas Zito Racing Stable, Inc. They claimed that they usually worked more than 40 hours a week as grooms, hot walkers, and exercise riders, but were not paid overtime for the extra work. This practice, they said, violated both the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and New York state law