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.

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.

The California Supreme Court unanimously upholds Proposition 22 (Bus. & Prof. Code, § 7451), holding that the Legislature’s “plenary” and “unlimited” authority over workers’ compensation under article XIV, section 4 is not exclusive of the people’s reserved initiative power — while expressly reserving the harder questions about Proposition 22’s seven-eighths amendment rule.

Vazquez v. Jan-Pro Franchising International, Inc. (2021) 10 Cal.5th 944 holds that the ABC test adopted in Dynamex applies retroactively — to all cases not yet final when Dynamex was decided — exposing pre-2018 wage-order conduct to the new worker-classification standard.

The Court of Appeal affirms a statewide preliminary injunction against Uber and Lyft, holding the People likely to prevail under prong B of the ABC test (Lab. Code, § 2775) — rideshare driving is within the usual course of the companies’ business — and rejecting the “technology platform” defense as a false dichotomy. (Predates Proposition 22; see Castellanos.)