California employment case index

A firm filed a wage-and-hour class action duplicating one it had already filed elsewhere, then opposed a stay with a brief — drafted by a contract attorney using generative AI — full of nonexistent citations and at least eight fabricated quotations. The First District affirms $6,000 in section 128.7 sanctions: counsel of record bear ultimate responsibility for what they sign, and the duty to verify authority cannot be delegated to any form of technology.

A terminated COO forwarded her employer’s e-mails — some attorney-client privileged — to her personal account and handed them to her lawyers for her wrongful-termination and harassment cross-claims. The Fourth District holds the State Fund rule on handling privileged materials applies even to such intentional, unauthorized disclosures, and reverses the denial of the employer’s motion to disqualify counsel.

Intuitive Surgical defended a harassment suit by pointing to the adequacy of its attorney-led investigation, then tried to withhold the investigator’s findings as work product. The Sixth District grants the employee a writ: putting the investigation’s adequacy at issue waives privilege and even core work product over the investigator’s factual findings and anything bearing on the investigation’s scope and adequacy.

Two Chico State physics professors sued the CSU Trustees for retaliation, alleging a sham investigation and sabotage of their move to a new university after they reported harassment. The Trustees moved to strike the claims under the anti-SLAPP statute as “based in part” on protected speech. The Third District affirms denial: a movant must analyze each claim element-by-element and identify which acts are protected — “based in part” is not enough.

A nursing student said the faculty member running her hospital clinical rotation sexually harassed her and tanked her grade when she refused him. The Fourth District holds a student in a required clinical placement is an “unpaid intern” protected by FEHA, and reverses summary judgment on standing, Government-Claims-Act notice, and deliberate indifference.

Cambodian villagers forced to work at Thai seafood factories sued a U.S. marketer under the trafficking civil-remedy statute; their case was dismissed because the statute then reached only those who succeeded in benefiting, not those who attempted to. After Congress amended the law, the en banc Ninth Circuit holds the clarifying amendment retroactive — and that Landgraf governs all such amendments, overruling the “clarifying amendment” exception — reviving the claims.

A resident manager whose apartment came with the job refused to leave after she was terminated. The Appellate Division affirms an unlawful detainer judgment: housing provided as part of employment compensation is not a protected tenancy, the former manager became a tenant at sufferance or licensee outside the Tenant Protection Act, and her retaliatory-eviction defense failed for lack of evidence.

A fire-department mechanic repeatedly confronted management and then alluded to an incident in which a firefighter fatally shot another firefighter. The Second District affirms a three-year workplace violence restraining order under section 527.8: the veiled reference was a credible, implied threat outside the First Amendment, and the order’s firearm restriction survives Second Amendment review under Rahimi.

A coworker’s off-site sexual advances were not work-related and not imputable to the employer — yet the Fifth District held the employee still stated a FEHA hostile-work-environment claim, because the employer’s refusal to act and its HR representative’s mocking response could independently alter the workplace in an objectively severe manner. A pleading-stage reversal that imports the Ninth Circuit’s totality-of-the-circumstances, employer-response framework (Fuller, Okonowsky) into California law.

An LAPD captain never witnessed officers passing around a fake nude photo of her and was never confronted to her face — yet the Second District affirmed a $4 million FEHA verdict, holding that her secondhand knowledge of the department-wide circulation, and the LAPD’s refusal to stop it, supplied substantial evidence of a severe or pervasive hostile work environment. A leading application of Government Code section 12923.

Reversing summary judgment for United Airlines, the Court of Appeal held that whether three male employees with comparable social-media accounts were "similarly situated" comparators was a question for the jury, applied the continuing violation doctrine and section 12923's low bar to the harassment claim, and found a two-week complaint-to-termination gap sufficient for retaliation causation.

The Ninth Circuit reversed summary judgment for the Bureau of Prisons, holding that a corrections lieutenant’s off-duty Instagram page targeting a prison psychologist — followed by more than a hundred coworkers — is part of the totality of the circumstances in a Title VII hostile-work-environment claim. There is no rule that only conduct inside the physical workplace counts, ‘especially in light of the ubiquity of social media,’ and the employer’s dismissive, ineffectual response can independently create a hostile environment.

Eight warehouse workers alleged their employer let staff blast “sexually graphic, violently misogynistic” music for nearly two years over almost daily complaints. The Ninth Circuit vacated a Rule 12(b)(6) dismissal, holding that pervasive sexist content can create a Title VII hostile work environment even if it targets no one and offends both sexes — and that an employer’s “equal opportunity harasser” status “provides no escape hatch for liability.”

A Rite Aid district manager sent a staff pharmacist lewd photos in a late-night, off-site text exchange that grew out of a friendship predating her employment. The Fifth District affirmed summary judgment for the employer, holding that FEHA strict liability for supervisor harassment attaches only when the supervisor acts “in the capacity of supervisor,” not where the conduct arises from a completely private relationship — and that the plaintiff, invited back after the harasser was fired, was not constructively discharged.