Zach P. Hutton

Zach P. Hutton

SAN FRANCISCO - Zach P. Hutton is chair of the Paul Hastings’ San Francisco employment department and serves as co-chair of the firm’s nationwide wage and hour practice group. His experience and consistent participation have distinguished him in the market’s largest and most complex matters.

Hutton’s practice includes all aspects of employment law, with a particular focus on wage and hour litigation and advice work. He successfully represents employers in disputes of all types, including numerous class and collective actions, individual plaintiff cases, agency investigations, and administrative hearings— both trying cases to verdict and securing early dismissal.

He and his team won summary judgment on all claims in one representative action brought under the PAGA, where the plaintiff purported to assert wage and hour claims on behalf of every employee of Google and contingent worker assigned to work at Google in California.

“It has become increasingly common for plaintiffs to allege very broad cookie-cutter complaints against multiple defendants and then use discovery to determine whether any of them committed violations,” Hutton said. “The court held that a plaintiff must first show that they’ve experienced an actual violation in order to maintain the case.”

The court held the evidence established that Google did not jointly employ the plaintiff and therefore she could not maintain claims as an allegedly “aggrieved employee” under PAGA. Olga Ortmann v. Adecco USA, Inc, 19CV355315 (Santa Clara Sup. Ct., filed Feb 4, 2021).

A team led by Hutton won an appeal in a precedent-setting case involving California wage and hour law.

An employee asserted class action and representative action claims alleging that her employer, General Atomics, violated California’s pay stub requirements by using a common format that depicts 0.5x overtime premiums separately from base pay.

Hutton persuaded the court of appeal to issue a writ ordering the trial court to grant a summary judgment for the employer. Gen. Atomics v. Superior Court, 64 Cal. App.5th 987, 279 Cal. Rptr. 3d 373 (Cal. Ct. App. 2021).

“There was a rash of cases where plaintiffs alleged that when you pay someone overtime, you have to depict it a certain way on the pay stub, as a unitary 1.5 overtime rate, instead of separately depicting the overtime premium, and there are complicated, but very important practical impediments to doing that when employees receive multiple forms of pay,” Hutton said. “What that case confirmed is that there’s more than one way to depict overtime on a pay stub, and it’s lawful to depict overtime premiums separately from other pay.”

--Douglas Saunders