California employment case index

California's fee-default statutes have become the most-used route out of employer-drafted arbitration, and in August 2025 the Supreme Court rewrote how they work. Code of Civil Procedure sections 1281.97 and 1281.98 still declare that a drafting party who pays the arbitrator more than 30 days late is in material breach, in default, and has waived its right to compel arbitration. But in Hohenshelt v. Superior Court the court held, 5-2, that this scheme survives FAA preemption only on a construction that leaves intact the background relief-from-forfeiture provisions — Code of Civil Procedure section 473, subdivision (b) and Civil Code sections 3275 and 1511 — so that the loss of the arbitral forum follows only from nonpayment that was willful, grossly negligent, or fraudulent. Mandatory monetary sanctions under section 1281.99, subdivision (a) still follow automatically. This synthesis sets out the operative statutory text and credit lines, traces the eleven Court of Appeal decisions the Supreme Court disapproved, states the post-Hohenshelt rule as a four-step sequence, shows how the first published application (Wilson v. Tap Worldwide) deployed it as an as-applied preemption argument, and identifies what remains open — including whether the same construction governs section 1281.97.

Reversing summary judgment for the UC Regents, the Second District mapped the post-Lawson landscape — Labor Code § 1102.6 governs § 1102.5 claims, Government Code § 8547.10(e) supplies the same framework for University of California whistleblowers, and McDonnell Douglas still governs Health and Safety Code § 1278.5 claims, under which Scheer's clause-by-clause dismantling of his termination letter raised a triable issue of pretext.

The after-acquired-evidence defence is raised in a large share of wrongful-termination cases and its effect is routinely mis-stated. It does not defeat liability. Under McKennon it limits the remedy — no reinstatement and no front pay as a general rule, with backpay running from the unlawful discharge to the date the employer actually discovered the wrongdoing — and under Salas v. Sierra Chemical Co. the same is true in California of both after-acquired evidence and unclean hands, neither of which is a complete defence to a FEHA claim. This analysis fixes the cut-off date, sets out what the employer must prove to earn it, keeps Salas's immigration-status holding in its proper place as a separate federal overlay, and explains why Camp v. Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro — the one California decision to produce a complete bar — now sits uneasily with Salas.