Wage and Hour Defense Blog

Our colleague Stuart M. Gerson at Epstein Becker Green wrote a new blog post that discusses the Supreme Court’s recent Dart decision: “Supreme Court Lowers the Bar for Class Action Removal.”

Following is an excerpt:

On December 15, 2014, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Dart Cherokee Basin Operating Co. v. Owens, a class action removal case.

 In short, the Dart case is welcome news to employers. Standards for removing a case from state to federal court have been an abiding point of concern for employers faced with “home town” class actions. In more ...

Michael Kun, co-founder of this blog and Member of Epstein Becker Green, was recently quoted in Inside Counsel about the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Wal-Mart v. Dukes decision upon wage-hour class actions.

The article, "Citing Dukes, Court Overturns Class Certification in Wage and Hour Dispute," focuses on the Ninth Circuit’s recent Wang v. Chinese Daily News decision, about which Michael has previously written in this blog.

by Michael Kun

In 2005, Congress passed the Class Action Fairness Act (“CAFA”) to ensure that large, interstate class actions could be heard in federal courts.  Under CAFA, federal courts have been given original jurisdiction over those class actions in which at least one party is diverse and the amount in controversy exceeds $5 million once all of the putative class members’ claims have been aggregated.

Likely before CAFA had even gone into effect, some plaintiffs’ lawyers devised a strategy to try to escape federal jurisdiction under CAFA – stipulating that they would ...

By Michael Kun

On Monday, June 25, 2011, the California Supreme Court issued its long-awaited decision in Coito v. Superior Court, addressing the issue of whether a party in litigation could rely upon the work product doctrine to withhold witness statements obtained by its attorneys or the identities of persons who had given such statements. 

In short, while parties in California have long relied upon dicta in the Court of Appeal decision known as  Nacht v. Lewis for the proposition that such information is protected from disclosure by the work product doctrine, case-by-case ...