Seyfarth Shaw LLP | www.seyfarth.com Litigating CA Wage & Hour and Labor Code Class Actions (22nd Edition) 77 In Brown v. Ralphs Grocery Co.,453 the Court of Appeal analyzed whether a plaintiff’s LWDA notice sufficiently pleaded “facts and theories” to support the violations claimed. The plaintiff alleged she and other aggrieved employees “did not take all meal and rest periods and were not properly compensated for missed meal and rest periods” in violation of sections 226.7 and 512.454 She claimed defendants “failed to pay [her] and other aggrieved employees all wages due to them within any time period specified by California Labor Code section 204.”455 The plaintiff alleged that defendants “did not provide [her] and other aggrieved employees with proper itemized wage statements” as required by section 226, subdivision (a), including by failing “to include the name and address of the legal entity that is the employer.”456 The Brown court held that plaintiff’s LWDA notice was deficient as to all alleged violations, with the exception of the facts provided to support the Section 226 wage statement claim. Brown stated that the notice “was a string of legal conclusions that parroted the allegedly violated Labor Code provisions. It did not state facts and theories supporting the alleged violations not implied by reference to the Labor Code.”457 The notice therefore did not give “sufficient information for the LWDA to assess the seriousness of the alleged violations and decide whether to allocate scarce resources to an investigation, or for defendants to determine what policies or practices were being complained of, have an opportunity to cure the violations, and prepare a meaningful response.”458 Thus, Brown concluded that part of the LWDA notice was inadequate and that the plaintiff had not adequately exhausted her administrative remedies, except as to the wage statement claim.459 The Ninth Circuit has taken a similar stance, holding that “a string of legal conclusions with no factual allegations or theories of liability to support them” is insufficient to provide proper notice to either the LWDA or to the employer.460 453 Brown v. Ralphs Grocery Co., 28 Cal. App. 5th 824, 837 (2018). 454 Id. 455 Id. 456 Id. 457 Id. 458 Id. at 837-38. 459 Id. at 829. Brown also found that the plaintiff could not amend her PAGA notice because the limitations period had expired, and neither equitable tolling nor the relation back doctrine applied. Id. at 841. 460 Alcantar v. Hobart Service, 800 F.3d 1047, 1057 (9th Cir. 2015). Some district courts have also followed the reasoning of Alcantar, holding that simply parroting the statute and asserting legal conclusions is insufficient to provide the requisite notice to exhaust administrative remedies for PAGA. See, e.g., Briggs v. OS Rest. Servs., LLC, 2020 WL 6260001, at *7 (C.D. Cal. Aug. 26, 2020) (“The PAGA Notice contains no facts specific to any of Defendants' alleged Labor Code violations, and does not present any information about Defendants' allegedly unlawful employment policies and practices. … Plaintiffs PAGA Notice does not specifically define the scope of the aggrieved employees or allege what unreimbursed expenses Defendants' current and former employees incurred. Indeed, as discussed above, the PAGA Notice fails to provide any specific factual allegations to support any of Plaintiffs claims under the Labor Code.”); De Paz v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., 2019 WL 8752051, at *12 (C.D. Cal. Dec. 10, 2019) (summary judgment granted; “as for her claims for improper recordkeeping and failure to pay timely wages, Plaintiff merely asserts insufficient legal conclusions. In her letter's final two sections, Plaintiff recites the statutory elements of her claims and includes only a sentence at the end parroting those elements. … Because the Court concludes that Plaintiff did not exhaust her administrative remedies as to these two claims, summary judgment is appropriate as to them”); Mitchell v. Corelogic, Inc., 2019 WL 7172978, at *7 (C.D. Cal. Nov. 20, 2019) (granting motion for judgment on the pleadings; “the First Letter contains a “string of legal conclusions” and does not contain any factual allegations or theories to support them. … Indeed, the letter simply states that Defendant has a ‘consistent policy’ of violating California laws regarding overtime, wage statement, and waiting time
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