As 2025 winds down, many employers are focused on year-end reviews, budget planning, and compliance checklists for the year ahead. But before turning the page on another year in California employment law, two recent jury verdicts serve as a sobering reminder of the continuing trend of nuclear verdicts as we have previously reported here, here, here, and here. Consider this your
Chevron announced on Friday its plans to relocate its headquarters from Northern California to Houston, Texas. Chevron first began doing business in California nearly 150 years ago in 1879 with the incorporation of the Pacific Coast Oil Company, headquartered in San Francisco.
In a public statement, Chevron said the move is due to a desire to “to co-locate with other senior leaders and enable
The Los Angeles Superior Court has bestowed some remarkable gifts upon plaintiffs this holiday season. Two juries have issued gigantic verdicts in favor of individual plaintiffs in separate employment lawsuits within the past month.
On November 16, 2023, in Sosa v. Comerica Bank, a jury delivered a verdict of $14.17 million consisting of $1.17 million in lost earnings (past and future) and $13 million in emotional
California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) is already one of the most employee-friendly state civil rights laws in the country. Until now, it was not clear whether employees could sue not only their direct employers for discrimination and harassment, but also other independent businesses that work on behalf on their employers.
In Raines v. U.S. Healthworks Medical Group, the California Supreme Court ruled
It is no secret that California is no friend to arbitration agreements. As the United States Supreme Court noted in its 2011 opinion in AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, “California’s courts have been more likely to hold contracts to arbitrate unconscionable than other contracts,” despite directives from the High Court that arbitration agreements must be placed “upon the same footing as other contracts.”
Not to be outdone by the courts, the California Legislature decided to weigh in on the ongoing battle over arbitration agreements with the introduction of Assembly Bill 465 (“AB 465”) earlier this year.
California Governor Jerry Brown has signed into law a number of bills addressing a wide array of issues that could significantly impact employers in the coming year. Read on for an overview of some of these new laws and their key provisions.
Campbell v. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, 2011 WL 2342740 (9th Cir. June 15, 2011) (pdf)
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed a lower court’s grant of partial summary judgment in favor of the plaintiff-junior accountants, noting that the district court’s holding would produce “significantly troubling results” and create “highly problematic precedent affecting several non-accounting professions.” The plaintiffs, a class of approximately 2,000 current or former junior accountants resident in six California offices of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (“PwC”), claimed that PwC improperly classified them as “exempt” employees and failed to provide them overtime pay in accordance with California’s rigid overtime pay requirements. As “junior accountants,” the plaintiffs occupied the bottom two tiers of their department’s seven-tier hierarchy and performed, among other accounting functions, audits of financial records. While Certified Public Accountant (“CPA”) licenses were required for the five levels above them, the plaintiffs were unlicensed.