Earlier this month I presented a program for the Beverly Hills Bar Association titled “Defending Businesses to Minimize Litigation Exposure.” The material was built around the questions I get from business owners and HR teams every week: where is the liability actually coming from in 2026, what quietly creates it, and what can an employer do now that will still matter when a claim arrives. I covered a lot in an hour — the PAGA and class action landscape, meal and rest breaks, overtime and regular rate math, classification, records, terminations, and disability accommodations. Rather than try to reproduce the whole outline, this week’s Friday’s Five pulls out the points that generated the most questions and that I think employers will find most useful.
Not every employee experiences harassment or discrimination, thankfully. But every employee gets a paycheck, and a wage and hour claim does not need a supervisor who did something wrong. It needs a payroll setting, a scheduling habit, or a policy gap that repeats across the workforce. That is the structural reason these claims dominate California employment litigation, and the data we track in our settlement database (full disclosure: I co-founded Scaled Comp, the software we use to track and analyze it) bears it out:
Millions of Aussies will be cheering Ben Roberts-Smith after seeing his publicity campaign. But we must leave all these matters to a criminal court to decide – this time beyond reasonable doubt.