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 district court remanded a California wage-and-hour class action on its own motion because the removing employer had not produced evidence justifying the violation rate behind its $15 million amount-in-controversy figure. The Ninth Circuit vacated: a CAFA defendant may rely on a chain of reasoning built from assumptions tethered to the complaint, and cannot fairly be asked to prove violations it denies ever occurred. Ibarra still bites where the defendant's reading of the pleading is unreasonable – but not merely because a lower rate was equally plausible. The uncomfortable corollary for plaintiffs is that vague frequency language such as at times is now a jurisdictional concession made at the drafting table.

Nine days after Fatmeh Badih told her employer — a physician with fewer than five employees — that she was pregnant, her last day was set; the DFEH would not even accept her complaint because the office was too small for the FEHA. Division One of the First District affirmed her wrongful-discharge verdict anyway, holding that pregnancy discrimination is a form of sex discrimination under article I, section 8 of the California Constitution, whose fundamental public policy against sex discrimination in employment binds every employer regardless of size. Jennings v. Marralle was distinguished, not disturbed: age has no constitutional anchor, but sex — and therefore pregnancy — does. Badih remains the pleading answer for pregnancy discharges at California's smallest workplaces.