Seyfarth Shaw LLP | www.seyfarth.com Litigating CA Wage & Hour Class and PAGA Actions (23rd Edition) 101 In Brown v. Ralphs Grocery Co.,484 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 512.485 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.”486 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.”487 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.”488 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.”489 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.490 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.491 the alleged violations); but see Brown v. Cinemark, 705 Fed. App’x 604 (9th Cir. 2017) (stating, while reversing trial court’s ruling that PAGA letter was insufficiently specific: Plaintiff’s “PAGA letter pleaded facts and theories sufficient to put Defendants and the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency on notice for potential investigation, which satisfies the policy goal of California Labor Code § 2699.3(a)”). 484 Brown v. Ralphs Grocery Co., 28 Cal. App. 5th 824, 837 (2018). 485 Id. 486 Id. 487 Id. 488 Id. 489 Id. at 837-38. 490 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. 491 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
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