Glenn A. Danas

Since joining Robins Kaplan LLP's Los Angeles office last year as part of the firm's appellate advocacy and guidance group, Danas has built his practice with a focus on plaintiff-side employee and consumer class actions.

"There's a lot of freedom in being able to expand my practice and work on different types of things on a bit of a larger scale and on a larger geographic area," Danas said.

These days, a lot of his focus is on the Private Attorneys General Act, known as PAGA, which gives employees the right to sue their employers for state labor code violations. Recently, Danas won a decision in state appellate court reversing a lower court ruling that a former Ralphs' employee's notice letter was inadequate. Brown v. Ralphs Grocery Company, 2018 DJDAR 10583 (Cal. App. 2nd. Dist. Oct. 31, 2018).

The appellate panel ruled the employee's original 2009 PAGA notice satisfied the law's requirement to provide minimal facts in support of the allegation.

"I think that helps to answer one of the questions that we have long had: Is the notice letter really more of a perfunctory thing or is it really intended to provide substantive notice to the [Labor and Workforce Development Agency]?" Danas said. "So it's incumbent on plaintiffs to make sure that they write a very substantive PAGA letter."

The case is significant to Danas. It was one of his first cases, leading to a published decision back in 2011, before the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling on AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion compelling workers to arbitration rather than class action.

That case makes PAGA and the relief it can provide employees all the more important, Danas said.

"Issues that have been up in the air for a long time are being fleshed out, most recently issues having to do with PAGA notice and what the notice requirement to the LWDA requires," he said. "There are going to be more cases that talk about amending the notice letter and how far back to notice letter can go."

Danas credits his love of employment law to his time as an undergraduate at Cornell University. There, he took classes at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, the first institution of its kind to study and teach workplace issues at the college level.

After law school and a clerkship that focused on employment discrimination, Danas joined Sherman & Sterling LLP in New York, where he worked on antitrust and securities litigation. He later joined Capstone Law APC when it was founded in 2012, moving to the West Coast.

"When it came time to transition out of the large defense firms and start on the plaintiffs' side, I was really interested in putting all of that background to use," he said, "especially in California, where there's such a comprehensive set of employment regulations."

-- Glenn Jeffers