When a wage-and-hour class action or PAGA lawsuit lands, the arbitration agreement is often the single most important document in the file. I made that point in my article on what businesses need to know about defending a class action and PAGA lawsuit, and the questions I said to answer in the first weeks of a case still apply: is the agreement enforceable, does it contain a valid class action waiver, and how many employees actually signed it?
This week I want to move that conversation earlier, to before a lawsuit is filed, because two dates on the calendar make now the right time to pull the agreement out of the onboarding packet and read it again. On January 1, 2027, AB 2155 takes effect and removes a fallback employers have long relied on to enforce arbitration under California law. And on November 3, the California Supreme Court will hear argument in Leeper v. Shipt, Inc., which will decide whether a PAGA plaintiff can avoid arbitration simply by leaving the individual claim out of the complaint.
Meanwhile, the Courts of Appeal have spent the last few months showing how agreements fail, and very few of those losses had anything to do with whether arbitration is allowed. They failed because of a related document signed at the same time, an outdated form, a scope clause that was too narrow, or how the employer handled the case after it was filed. Here are five things to fix now.
Health care entities may be able to pay less than half the steep fines ordinarily associated with False Claims Act (FCA) violations by voluntarily reporting issues under a new pilot program launche...