Duran v. U.S. Bank Nat’l Ass’n, 19 Cal. App. 5^th 630 (2018)

Samuel Duran and Matt Fitzsimmons filed this wage-and-hour class action challenging the Bank’s classification of its business banking officers as exempt employees under the outside salesperson exemption. The trial court denied class certification after concluding plaintiffs had failed to carry their burden of showing that common questions predominated. The trial court found survey data that was supplied by plaintiffs to be “unreliable for any purpose” and observed that the representative sampling offered by plaintiffs could not be used to establish an aggregate restitution award because the proposed sample sizes were not scientifically supportable for that purpose. Further, because some of the putative class members worked most of their time outside the office, the court determined that it would not be able to adequately manage the case because of the need for “a host of mini trials.” The Court of Appeal affirmed the order denying class certification. See also Lampe v. Queen of the Valley Med. Ctr., 19 Cal. App. 5^th 832 (2018) (trial court properly denied certification of nurses’ putative class action); compare ABM Indus. Overtime Cases, 19 Cal. App. 5^th 277 (2017) (trial court’s wholesale exclusion of plaintiffs’ expert evidence was error, as was trial court’s refusal to certify class of present and former ABM janitorial employees).