California employment case index

Lauren Brown filed the fifth of five overlapping PAGA actions against the same restaurant operator. While her case sat stayed, the employer settled globally with an earlier plaintiff, and the trial court then granted judgment on the pleadings. Division Eight affirmed. The only contested question it reached was whether the settling plaintiff's failure to wait the full 65 days after her amended agency notice destroyed the settlement's preclusive effect – and the court held it did not, because nothing extends the waiting period to amended notices and the agency itself had accepted the settlement. Brown also lacked standing for violations postdating her 2018 separation.

The Department of Consumer Affairs refused to discuss settlement, refused to stipulate to an amendment, demurred, moved for summary adjudication, rejected a $600,000 section 998 offer and lost a six-week trial – and then appealed the $4,889,786.03 fee award that followed. Division Eight affirmed all of it: top-of-market Los Angeles rates supported by the trial judge's own observation of counsel, a 1.75 multiplier through verdict and 1.25 on the fee litigation, and two holdings with reach – that a fee payable from public funds does not bar an enhancement, and that Ketchum's rule does not apply to FEHA fees, which section 12965 makes discretionary and therefore contingent until the final fee order.

A jury found that the Department of State Hospitals discriminated against Ashley Howell because of a mental disability, and awarded her lost earnings, lost health insurance, and nothing for pain and suffering. By the end of the appeal the insurance award was gone, the zero pain-and-suffering verdict stood, and a $1.75 million attorney fee request had been reduced to $135,102. The insurance award fell because Howell proved an obligation rather than a loss: she introduced a premium invoice she never paid, and she bought no replacement coverage, so there was nothing to compensate. The fee award survived because the trial court could not audit block-billed hours and because the request had grown more than tenfold from counsel's own pretrial estimate. Howell's only appellate win was a remand to rule on the prejudgment interest nobody had opposed. This is an adverse decision, and its value to the plaintiff's bar is as a checklist of what the damages and fee record has to contain.

Government Code section 12965(b) governs both fee and cost awards in FEHA actions and makes them discretionary under the asymmetric Christiansburg standard: a prevailing plaintiff ordinarily recovers fees and costs, but a prevailing defendant may recover them only if the action was objectively frivolous, unreasonable,…

Attorney fees awarded under section 12965 belong to the attorneys whose services earned them, except to the extent the attorneys and client have entered an enforceable agreement providing otherwise; the portion of a statutory fee award exceeding fees the client already paid does not belong to the client by default.

A worker fired nine months into his vacation year was denied every day of accrued vacation pay because his employer's policy made eligibility turn on still being employed on his anniversary date – a rule it had applied to roughly 300 departing employees. A unanimous Supreme Court held the policy could not defeat the right. Vacation pay is not a gratuity but deferred wages earned by the year's labor, so a proportionate right to it vests as the work is performed, exactly as pension rights vest on acceptance of employment. An anniversary requirement is at most a condition subsequent, and Labor Code section 227.3 forbids an employer policy from turning that condition into a forfeiture of what has already been earned.

In McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail Transportation Co. (1976) 427 U.S. 273, two white employees were discharged for participating in the theft of antifreeze from a shipment in their employer's care, while a Black employee charged with the same misconduct was retained. The Supreme Court held — unanimously as to Title VII, and seven-to-two as to 42 U.S.C. § 1981 — that both statutes protect against racial discrimination directed at any race, including white persons. An employer “may justifiably refuse to rehire one who was engaged in unlawful, disruptive acts against it, but only if this criterion is applied alike to members of all races.” The judgment dismissing the complaint was reversed and the case remanded.