On April 7, 2025, the California Court of Appeal reversed a whopping $10 million verdict in favor of an employee in a sexual harassment case due to the trial judge’s improper evidentiary rulings and inappropriate comments during the post-judgment phase of trial. Odom v. Los Angeles Cmty. Coll. Dist., No. B327997, 2025 WL 1021951, at *1 (Cal. Ct. App. Apr. 7, 2025).
Sabrena Odom
As 2024 came to a close, yet another California jury delivered a massive award to an individual plaintiff in an employment discrimination case. This time, it was an award of over $11 million by a San Diego jury to a medical screener at a plasma donation center (Roque v. Octapharma Plasma, Inc.). The 74-year-old plaintiff alleged that her employer failed to accommodate her
As we previously reported, a Los Angeles jury awarded one of the largest verdicts in history in a sexual assault case in June 2024, doling out a massive $900 million verdict in favor of a plaintiff in a suit against billionaire Alkiviades David. This week, however, a Los Angeles County Court found the damages award “shocked the conscience” and ordered the case to go
This week a Los Angeles jury awarded a plaintiff nearly $1 billion in damages for workplace sexual assault. The defendant, billionaire Alkiviades David, suffered a staggering loss when a Los Angeles Superior Court jury doled out a massive $900 million verdict in favor of David’s former employee, who brought suit against him in 2020 alleging years of sexual assault, battery, and harassment. Plaintiff was hired
Shah v. Skillz Inc., 101 Cal. App. 5th285 (2024)
Gautam Shah sued his former employer Skillz, Inc. for breach of contract, alleging that Skillz did not have cause to terminate his employment and wrongfully prevented him from exercising the stock options he had earned as a Skillz employee. The company allegedly terminated Shah “for cause” because he had forwarded a confidential business report to
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
An astronomical $137 million jury verdict against Tesla has again been reduced, for a second (and potentially final) time. Last Monday, following a five-day trial on damages, a federal court jury awarded Owen Diaz, a former Tesla elevator operator, $175,000 in emotional distress damages and $3 million in punitive damages, totaling nearly $3.2 million—almost $134 million shy of the award he originally obtained in 2021.
A California judge has ordered Farmers Insurance to pay almost $2.3 million in attorney’s fees to the lawyers of a successful whistleblower/former in-house attorney who claimed his role as a potential witness in a sex bias class action got him fired. The underlying judgment in favor of the whistleblower was $24.36 million – after the Judge reduced the punitive damages award by more than $131
As we have previously reported, jury verdicts in employment cases have continued to skyrocket in recent months, and there is no sign they are leveling off. Late last week, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury awarded a total of over $464 million ($440 million of which was in punitive damages) in a two-plaintiff retaliation case. This verdict is more than double any previous amount ever
We invite you to review our newly-posted May 2022 California Employment Law Notes, a comprehensive review of the latest and most significant developments in California employment law. The highlights include: