Brian C. Sinclair

Plaintiff-favorable outcomes in employment matters seem to involve increasingly large verdicts or settlements, Sinclair said, giving as an example the $100 million proposed deal in the Uber drivers litigation. That made his defense successes in achieving client-centric results significant, he said.

"Over the past year, I've been able to get multiple class actions and PAGA claims dismissed," Sinclair said, referring to representative actions brought under the state's Private Attorney General Act. "My approach is to find weaknesses in the plaintiffs' cases through careful analysis coupled with an extensive knowledge of California's wage and hour laws."

In one case dismissed in March, a plaintiff alleged both individual wage and hour claims and a PAGA representative claim against a tech consulting company, asserting that managers had misclassified workers as independent contractors instead of employees. The complaint alleged failure to pay minimum wages, failure to pay overtime wages, waiting-time penalties, failure to furnish accurate itemized wage statements and failure to reimburse for business expenses. Without conducting any discovery, Sinclair was able to resolve the dispute on an individual basis with dismissal of the PAGA claims on behalf of other purportedly aggrieved employees.

"In this one, the plaintiff had a misclassification theory of liability," Sinclair said, "so we went through the individual job duties at issue to look at what the worker could control and what the company could control. We found a lack of any potential damages even if the worker could prove he was misclassified. The time records showed no real damages. We also could show differences in the way the plaintiff operated on the job — he was an IT person — versus the way other individuals operated, the individuals he sought to represent. They had different kinds of jobs, different relationships with the company."

Sinclair said he had a telephonic meeting with opposing counsel. "We laid out the problems with his theory and his class. We settled with the plaintiff without any payment to the PAGA representatives. And I never had to go to Sacramento [where the lawsuit was filed]. That speaks to the extent of my practice all over California. Even though I'm in Orange County, I can represent clients throughout the state."

It's important to Sinclair to deal with new complaints soon after they are filed. "It is satisfying to be able to knock these out early," he said. "I try to avoid the class certification process — we like to defeat it on the strength of our opposition papers."

— John Roemer