Williams v. Superior Court: Employees' Perspective

• Publication year: 2017
• Author: By Glenn A. Danas and Ryan H. Wu

Williams v. Superior Court: Employees' Perspective

By Glenn A. Danas and Ryan H. Wu

Glenn Danas is a partner at Capstone Law APC and leads the firm's Appeals and Complex Motions Practice Group. Mr. Danas regularly argues in both the state and federal appellate courts, including two cases in the California Supreme Court in 2017—McGill v. Citibank, and Williams v. Superior Court—both unanimous victories for his clients. Ryan Wu is senior counsel at Capstone in the firm's Appeals and Complex Motions Practice Group, and has extensively briefed issues related to the PAGA, including Baumann v. Chase in the Ninth Circuit, and Williams, as well as class action attorneys' fees issues.

Introduction

Thirteen years after the enactment of the California Labor Code Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA),¹ which created a unique representative civil action for enforcing the Code, trial courts and litigants had little guidance from the appellate courts regarding the litigation of PAGA actions. Left largely on their own, many trial courts took to devising their own rules in structuring PAGA actions.

Thankfully, the California Supreme Court recently spoke on some of these critical issues. In Williams,² the California Supreme Court laid down some important ground rules. Reversing the lower courts, which had manufactured a rule requiring a PAGA plaintiff to sit for a deposition and prove that his claims had substantive merit before he could obtain the contact information of other non-party employees, the court held that PAGA plaintiffs have the same expansive discovery rights as do putative class action representatives. Under Williams, a PAGA plaintiff who alleges statewide Labor Code violations is presumptively entitled to contact information of other aggrieved employees throughout the state and is restricted only if a defendant can make a sufficient evidentiary showing of undue burden.

By turning back efforts to disable PAGA through onerous discovery restrictions, Williams ensures that PAGA actions will remain "one of the primary mechanisms for enforcing the Labor Code."³ The opinion signals to lower courts that the supreme court will not abide activist rulings that undermine PAGA's legislative purpose or limit litigants' right to discovery.

Williams offers other important takeaways. In evaluating a discovery objection based on third-party privacy interests, trial courts should apply, as a default, the relatively permissive three-factor test set forth in Hill v. National Collegiate Athletic Association,⁴ rather than the more restrictive test that requires the requesting party to demonstrate "compelling need" for the discovery. Moreover, the reasoning in Williams will guide lower courts in deciding several unsettled PAGA issues, including the sufficiency of the pre-suit letter to the LWDA, standing, and manageability.

The Scope of Discovery in a PAGA Action Is Framed by the Pleadings

One of the most contentious issues in PAGA litigation is whether a plaintiff is entitled to statewide discovery based on statewide allegations, and this issue was squarely presented in Williams. Plaintiff Michael Williams, pursuing a PAGA-only action for civil penalties, sought contact information of all non-exempt employees across the state in connection with his allegation that defendant Marshalls engaged in a statewide practice of denying full meal and rest breaks to its employees and under-reimbursing business expenses, among other claims. At the discovery motion hearing, Williams offered to take a 10-20 percent sample of the contact information of employees statewide and use a Belaire-West privacy notice so that employees had an opportunity to opt out of having their information disclosed.⁵ The trial court rejected that offer and instead ordered that Marshalls produce contact information only of the Costa Mesa store at which Williams worked, an amount equivalent to less than 1% of the names and contact information sought. The trial court conditioned Williams's right to seek additional discovery on "at least six productive hours of [his] deposition" to demonstrate his...