Archive for category: News Items

On September 12, 2023, Inland Empire United and individual Riverside County residents represented by Altshuler Berzon LLP reached a settlement agreement with Riverside County to dramatically expand access to political participation in Riverside County for historically underrepresented communities. The settlement in Inland Empire United, et al. v. Riverside County, et al., No. CVRI2202423 (Riverside Superior Court), guarantees county funding of $1.75 per voter in low turnout areas for voter education and outreach efforts in contested elections through 2030 (substantially more than the County has funded in previous elections), as well as Spanish language translation of Board of Supervisors and Registrar of Voters documents and live Spanish interpretation of meetings and hearings through 2030. The settlement will also ensure that the County provides Spanish language ballots and election materials through 2030, and will require that any redistricting of the supervisorial map that occurs in the County through 2030 will be done by an independent redistricting commission, rather than by the Board of Supervisors themselves.

The settlement resolves litigation filed by Inland Empire United and the individual petitioners in 2022 challenging the supervisorial map adopted in 2021 as unlawful under California’s FAIR MAPS Act. Petitioners argued that the map diluted the ability of members of the underrepresented Latino community to equally and fully participate in the political process. The settlement provides relief targeted to expand those opportunities.

Altshuler Berzon LLP represents Inland Empire United and four individual petitioners in the case. The ACLU Foundation of Southern California and Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP represent two other individual petitioners. For a prior post about this litigation, see here.

The final settlement agreement is here.

CMA v. Aetna: Expanded Access to the Courts for Non-Profits, Labor Unions, and Other Organizational Plaintiffs

On July 17, 2023, the California Supreme Court issued two important opinions that expanded access to the California state courts, the first for employees who have suffered violations of the California Labor Code (Adolph v. Uber, see here) and the second for organizations challenging unlawful, unfair or fraudulent business practices by corporate defendants. Altshuler Berzon LLP attorneys successfully argued both cases. 

In California Medical Association v. Aetna Health of California, Inc., which was Justice Kelli Evans’s first majority opinion as a Supreme Court Justice, the Court unanimously held that an organization satisfies the standing requirement of California’s Unfair Competition Law (“UCL”) if “in furtherance of a bona fide, preexisting mission, [the organization] incurs costs to respond to perceived unfair competition that threatens that mission, so long as those expenditures are independent of costs incurred in UCL litigation or preparations for such litigation.”   

Proposition 64, which was enacted by the voters in 2004, limited the scope of UCL standing by requiring plaintiffs to demonstrate, as a condition of bringing a UCL suit, that they “suffered injury in fact and [have] lost money or property as a result of the unfair competition.” In CMA, the Court unanimously held that an organization satisfies that requirement when it has “expended staff time or other resources on responding to a new threat to its mission, diverting those resources from other projects.” As long as the organization devoted staff resources to addressing the challenged practice and did so in a manner that sought to further its underlying mission, the standing requirements of Proposition 64 would be fully satisfied, according to the Court.  

The CMA decision will substantially expand the ability of organizational plaintiffs, including labor unions, non-profits, and civil rights groups, to pursue legal challenges under the UCL to unlawful, unfair, or fraudulent business practices that threaten their missions.  

Whatley Kallas LLP also represented CMA in this case. The decision is available here. 

On July 6, 2023, the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of California granted a motion to dismiss federal antitrust and labor law claims brought by a hotel developer against UNITE HERE! Local 30, the San Diego County Building and Construction Trades Council, and those unions’ leaders.  The hotel developer alleged that the unions and union officials had engaged in unlawful conduct designed to coerce the hotel developer to agree to a card check neutrality agreement and project labor agreement, including by opposing and threatening to file environmental challenges to the proposed hotel redevelopment plan.  The court dismissed the hotel developer’s claims with prejudice on the grounds that the supposedly unlawful activity was all petitioning activity protected by the First Amendment under the Noerr-Pennington doctrine.  The court had previously dismissed the hotel developer’s RICO and state law claims. Altshuler Berzon represented defendants San Diego County Building and Construction Trades Council and Tom Lemmon.  The Coopersmith Law Firm also represented Mr. Lemmon, and the other defendants were represented by McCracken, Stemerman & Holsberry LLP. The order can be found here.

On May 26, 2023, the Alameda Superior Court granted final approval to a class action settlement reached between the Center for Workers’ Rights (represented by Altshuler Berzon LLP and in-house counsel Daniela Urban) and the California Employment Development Department.  The parties reached a final settlement agreement after more than two years of negotiations in which the parties took a novel, cooperative approach focused on identifying practicable and immediate solutions to some of the serious—and seemingly unlawful—obstacles to accessing unemployment insurance that claimants faced during the COVID-19 pandemic.  The settlement has already resulted in conditional payment of more than $769 million to more than 639,000 unemployment insurance claimants.

The two-part class action settlement requires EDD to implement injunctive relief benefiting two classes of unemployment insurance claimants.  The first group, the “Continued Claims Status Class,” includes unemployment insurance claimants who received at least one benefits payment, who certified eligibility for benefits for at least one additional week, and whose eligibility remained unresolved.  Among other measures, EDD agreed to make conditional payments to those Continued Claims Status Class Members while their eligibility for current and future benefits was being investigated, and to notify those class members that the benefits they are receiving are conditioned on EDD’s eligibility review.  Under the terms of the settlement, EDD was required to implement the agreed relief for the Continued Claims Status Class beginning in July 2021 while the parties continued their negotiations, and the relief has already benefited hundreds of thousands of claimants.

The second group, the “Late-Notice-of-Overpayment Class,” consists of EDD claimants not found to have engaged in fraud, misrepresentation, or willful nondisclosure who received benefits from EDD under a qualifying program between October 1, 2019 and May 26, 2023, and to whom EDD issued a notice of overpayment more than one year after the close of the benefit year in which the claimant received the benefits in question.  EDD agreed to cancel existing notices of overpayment issued more than one year after the close of the benefit year in which a Late-Notice-of-Overpayment Class member received the benefits addressed in the overpayment notice, to refund amounts class members have already repaid in response to these overpayment notices, and to stop issuing such overpayment notices going forward.

The case is Center for Workers’ Rights v. California Employment Development Department, et al., Case No. RG21106525. The final approval order summarizing the agreed programmatic relief is here. The July 22, 2021 settlement agreement is here, and the February 16, 2023 settlement agreement is here. Please refer to the settlement agreement for detailed information on its terms.

On May 19, 2023, Altshuler Berzon LLP, together with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California and Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP, filed a motion in the Riverside County Superior Court seeking an order prohibiting Riverside County from using the current Board of Supervisors district map and ordering the County to adopt a new supervisorial district map that complies with the requirements of California’s landmark recent redistricting legislation, the Fair And Inclusive Redistricting for Municipalities And Political Subdivisions Act (“FAIR MAPS Act”), Elec. Code §§ 21500-2150. The case is Inland Empire United, et al. v. Riverside County, et al., Case No. CVRI2202423. Altshuler Berzon LLP represents lead petitioner Inland Empire United and four individual co-petitioners.

The motion argues that Riverside County adopted a supervisorial district map following the 2020 census that unlawfully dilutes the voting strength of Latinos in Riverside County by splitting two majority Latino communities of interest among three districts, in violation of both the California Constitution’s equal protection guarantees and the federal Voting Rights Act, both of which are expressly incorporated into the FAIR MAPS Act. The motion also agues that the County independently violated the FAIR MAPS Act by considering and prioritizing incumbency when adopting the current map, and by improperly failing to prioritize keeping communities of interest whole over keeping cities whole. Petitioners request an order prohibiting the County from using the current map in any future election and compelling the County to comply with the FAIR MAPS Act by adopting a new, lawful supervisorial district map.

The Verified Petition for Writ of Mandate in the case is available here. The Motion for Issuance of a Peremptory Writ of Mandate is available here.