Everyone was sure a new wage-discrimination law passed early last year would create a path to employers' wallets. Now, after several suits have been filed under the law, we know what steps employers should take to protect themselves.

The law is called the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Congress passed it to counter a Supreme Court ruling on the requirements an employee must meet to win a discrimination suit based on unfair pay.

In the case — Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. — the High Court said, essentially, that an employee had to file suit not more than 180 days from the time of the first alleged pay violation. The female employee in the case said she'd been underpaid for years because of gender and wanted to sue for back wages. The court said she couldn't because the 180-day clock started ticking the day she received her first paycheck — not the day she received her most recent paycheck.

Here comes Congress

Enter Congress. It wrote and passed a law saying just the opposite: that an employee could go back years and years, and file a discrimination suit asking for all the back wages that allegedly had been withheld all those years.

The law looked like a disaster for employers. Besides the threat of a lawsuit over some near-ancient dispute, the law also made for a recordkeeping nightmare.

An analysis of the major suits filed under Ledbetter shows, however, that employers aren't exactly defenseless — that courts will take into account reasonable steps to pay fair wages, and prevent frivolous suits. There are three major factors that can work in your favor:

1. Employers that have a reasonable pay system — based on factors such as job responsibility, productivity, quality of work, etc. — generally get a “pass” from courts when there appears to be a one-time, inadvertent error that results in lower pay for, say, a woman than a man in a similar job. If you follow a system, a dumb mistake won't hang you.
2. An employee can't just file a discrimination suit and say it's about pay. It has to really be about pay. Of course, that doesn't mean you're going to overlook rare instances of real discrimination, but if it does happen, you won't be a sitting duck for just any charge of wage discrimination if you have a solid pay system that rewards employees for good work or any other measurable factor.
3. Employers that keep good records about performance standards generally win. What that usually means is you'll want to have on file an explanation of why an employee did or didn't get a raise or promotion or was subject to any other action that affected pay.