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The lawyer at the centre of a record-breaking underpayment class action says employees' "cries for change" had fallen on deaf ears, and urges other employers to "get ahead of any errors" now.

The class action was lodged on behalf of 20,000 junior doctors, and NSW Health recently agreed to settle it for $229.8 million – the largest underpayment class action outcome in Australian legal history.

Hayden Stephens of Hayden Stephens & Associates says the action – which his firm ran together with Maurice Blackburn Lawyers – was partly the result of "behaviour that's been embedded in the treatment of junior doctors in the public health system for a number of years", and partly due to technical errors, namely those in NSW Health's pay systems...