Prior to the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Viking River Cruises Inc. v. Moriana, California courts did not consider the components of a Private Attorneys General Act (“PAGA”) claim.  In the Viking River opinion, the Court delineated between a “representative PAGA claim” – referring to a PAGA claim based on violations that employees other than the plaintiff had suffered – and an “individual PAGA claim”, which referred to a portion of a PAGA action that is “based on code violations suffered by the plaintiff.”  The California Supreme Court followed ...

Q:      I am a state court receiver in a case that has been disrupted by a bankruptcy filing. The bankruptcy trustee has been threatening to sue me, in the bankruptcy court, for what she claims were negligent actions and to recover alleged preferential transfers. Doesn’t the trustee have to get prior permission from the state receivership court to be able to sue me?

A:      Yes. The Barton Doctrine [ Barton v. Barbour, 104 U.S. 126 (1881) ] provides that a party seeking to sue a receiver must first obtain leave of the appointing court to do so and, absent such leave, no other court has jurisdiction to ...

Tell me if you have heard this one before: ten companies are sued by a former employee as “joint employers”, even though the employee technically worked for, and signed a binding arbitration agreement with, only one of them.  The employers then move to compel arbitration and the employee opposes the motion.  The trial court grants or denies the motion to compel and the losing party (or parties) appeal(s).  If this sounds familiar, it is because there are no less than six published appellate court decisions have come down in recent years that have wrestled with the issue of whether joint ...