Andrew M. Paley

Paley is co-chair of the wage & hour litigation practice at Seyfarth Shaw, chair of the firm's California wage & hour litigation group and a member of the labor & employment steering committee. He has litigated more than 100 class and collective actions for alleged wage and hour violations under both state and federal law.

One specialty is his talent for successfully attacking improper statistical and survey methodologies relied upon by plaintiffs' counsel in class and collective actions. "I joke that I went to law school because math was not my strong suit, but I do work with statistics experts and I have learned more than I ever thought I would know about this discipline," he said.

Paley led a Seyfarth team that successfully decertified a class action brought by field auto insurance adjusters alleging off the clock work underpayments. Williams v. Allstate Insurance Co., BC382577 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed Dec. 19, 2007).

The case's tangled and lengthy history included two trips to the court of appeal. After almost ten years of litigation, the trial court agreed with Paley's argument that the plaintiffs' statistics were inadequate and failed to comply with sound methodology. The court further agreed that if proper sampling methodologies were followed, the class would be unmanageable at trial because the sample size would require testimony from 400 or so class members.

A 2d District Court of Appeal panel agreed, affirming the trial court's decertification order with respect to the off-the-clock class of plaintiffs. Williams v. Allstate Insurance Co., B272353 (2d DCA, opinion filed Dec. 13, 2017).

That led to a 2019 settlement on favorable terms, Paley said. "The law in wage and hour cases is very sparse," he added. "There used to be a focus on the commonality argument. Later the question became, what does collective evidence mean? Sometimes that's easy to answer where there are uniform policies we can examine. But off-the-clock cases come down to the issue of what is sufficient collective evidence that can be used to prove a case scientifically? What level of certainty can you attain so that the case is not just anecdotal? Our Supreme Court said you have to use statistics correctly, and that's where the interesting battles have moved to."

The outcome in Williams led to success in two subsequent cases in which Paley again defended Allstate by critiquing the plaintiffs' statistical evidence: McCleery v. Allstate Insurance Co., BC410865 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed May 1, 2009) and Jimenez v. Allstate Insurance Co., 10-cv-08486 (C.D. Cal., filed Nov. 8, 2010).

"Williams very much gave us momentum in those cases," Paley said.

-- John Roemer