160 Litigating CA Wage & Hour Class and PAGA Actions (23rd Edition) Seyfarth Shaw LLP | www.seyfarth.com address whether plaintiffs may typically obtain discovery of the putative class members’ names and personal contact information. The California Supreme Court directly addressed this issue, albeit within the consumer class action context, in Pioneer Electronics (USA), Inc. v. Superior Court.802 The plaintiff in Pioneer filed a discovery motion seeking to compel the defendant to disclose the names and addresses of customers who complained about a defective DVD player. Ruling for the plaintiff, the Supreme Court instructed Pioneer to send a notice of the suit to all potential class members allowing them to object to the release of their names and contact information to the plaintiff. The defendant was directed to release the names of those who did not respond to the notice and affirmatively object to disclosure. The first published appellate decision to apply Pioneer to the wage and hour context was Belaire-West Landscape, Inc. v. Superior Court.803 In that case, the appellate court went even further than Pioneer, requiring the defendant to release the addresses and personal telephone numbers of all current and former employees who did not affirmatively opt out in response to a pre-certification class notice. Moreover, in contrast to the plaintiff in Pioneer, who sought information only on those putative class members who had affirmatively complained about the product at issue, the Belaire-West plaintiff sought personal information of all current and former employees within the putative class. Two decisions that followed in the wake of Belaire-West have extended its holding to broaden the plaintiffs’ rights to contact information. Indeed, the decisions have led many plaintiffs’ lawyers to contend that they always have the right to the putative class members’ contact information and that the trial court has discretion to skip the Belaire-West process altogether. First, in Puerto v. Superior Court,804 the Court of Appeal held that it was an abuse of discretion for the trial court to require consent from putative class members before releasing their personal contact information, when the defendant had responded to discovery by listing each putative class member as a witness with information relevant to the case. Puerto held that “the right to privacy in contact information is unlikely to trump the [plaintiffs’] right to investigate their claims by contacting witnesses.”805 Because of the unusual fact that the defendant had listed every putative class member by name and attested in verified discovery responses that each person was a percipient witness, Puerto could be distinguished from the typical class action.806 802 40 Cal. 4th 360 (2007). 803 149 Cal. App. 4th 554 (2007). 804 158 Cal. App. 4th 1242 (2008). 805 Id. at 1248. 806 Puerto was followed by a federal district court in Stone v. Advance America, 2010 WL 5892501 (S.D. Cal. Sept. 21, 2010). In Stone, the district court had previously allowed the plaintiff to obtain class-member contact information through notice and an opt-out procedure. Thereafter, the plaintiff propounded interrogatories requesting the identities and contact information for defendant’s former employees during the class period. The district court held that no notice or opt-out procedure was required to obtain this information under Rule 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, because the plaintiff sought only basic discovery, i.e., the names and contact information for percipient witnesses, which the court distinguished from the names and contact information of class members (even though there was substantial overlap between the two).
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