©2025 Seyfarth Shaw LLP www.seyfarth.com 2025 Cal-Peculiarities | 129 proclaiming that Balderas did not birth a new PAGA creature. In Leeper v. Shipt, Inc., a case handled by Seyfarth, the trial court denied a motion to compel arbitration on the basis that the plaintiff’s PAGA action did not allege an individual PAGA claim which would be subject to arbitration. The Court of Appeal, adopted Seyfarth’s arguments and held that based on the unambiguous, ordinary meaning of the PAGA statute, every PAGA action necessarily includes an individual PAGA claim.485 Broad discovery rights. The California Supreme Court, in Williams v. Superior Court,486 made PAGA more annoying yet. A PAGA plaintiff suing a retailer sought personal contact information for thousands of California employees, not just those at the store where he worked. The Court of Appeal upheld the trial court’s discretion to find that the plaintiff had failed to specify good cause to justify the broad discovery sought, but the Supreme Court in Williams reversed. Williams held that in both class and representative actions “the contact information of those a plaintiff purports to represent is routinely discoverable as an essential prerequisite to effectively seeking group relief.”487 Williams acknowledged that “the Legislature was aware that establishing a broad right to discovery might permit parties lacking any valid cause of action to engage in fishing expeditions to a defendant’s inevitable annoyance,” but granted the right to broad discovery anyway.488 Williams reasoned that the plaintiff “was presumptively entitled” to the information and that the employer had failed to justify withholding the information on any of three grounds: overbreadth, undue burden, and privacy.489 In rejecting the employer’s argument about overbreadth, Williams held that employee contact information was reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence.490 The rules for PAGA discovery are the same as those applied in class actions, where plaintiffs can learn names and contact information of other potentially aggrieved employees to gather information to support their claims.491 Williams rejected the employer’s view that PAGA actions are different because PAGA plaintiffs must show that individuals are “aggrieved employees.”492 Instead, for discovery purposes, the plaintiffs need only allege that the employees at issue are aggrieved.493 In rejecting the employer’s argument about undue burden, Williams noted that contact information often appears in a central database, so it would be the exception rather than the rule that an employer could show that producing statewide contact information would be too burdensome.494 In rejecting the employer’s argument about privacy, Williams affirmed that the rules in place as to wage and hour class actions apply to PAGA actions as well. Notwithstanding the privacy right in one’s personal contact information, trial courts cannot preclude discovery of employee contact information or require that employees affirmatively consent to disclosure before allowing it.495 Rather, a court can call for a privacy notice that gives employees the chance to affirmatively opt out, with the default result being disclosure of contact information.496 In this connection, Williams reversed published decisions that had required a party seeking discovery implicating privacy to show a “compelling need” for production. Williams said the degree of the privacy invasion is not always so great as to require a “compelling need” for production.497 While ordering the production of employee contact information in response to interrogatories, Williams acknowledged that when a party seeks information through other discovery devices, such as demands for inspection and copying, good cause must be shown before production may be compelled.498 Williams also recognized that a PAGA plaintiff must demonstrate “trial manageability,” such that a PAGA claim should be dismissed if there are too many individualized issues to allow the action to be manageably tried. Until January 2024, and despite Williams, there was an appellate split as to whether PAGA claims are subject to a motion to strike on manageability grounds.499 However, in its decision in Estrada v. Royalty Carpet Mills, Inc., the California Supreme Court made it clear that PAGA claims – and the broad discovery encompassed by them – cannot be stricken on grounds of manageability alone.500
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