Castillo v. Bank of Am., 980 F.3d 723 (9th Cir. 2020)

Cindy R. Castillo filed this putative class action in which she alleged that more than 5,000 similarly-situated call center employees had not been paid minimum wages or overtime pay and that they had been deprived of a second meal period. The district court denied Castillo’s motion for class certification of the overtime claim based upon the lack of predominance, though the court found sufficient commonality and typicality. The Ninth Circuit affirmed, holding that there was sufficient commonality (i.e., whether the bank’s policy of calculating overtime wages is lawful) and typicality (i.e., whether Castillo’s claims were typical of the putative class claims), but not predominance because Castillo sought to certify a class that contained many members who “were never exposed to the challenged [overtime] formulas or, if they were, were never injured by them.”