Dustin L. Collier

Dustin L. Collier

CORTE MADERA - Dustin L. Collier, who has been in practice since 2009, opened his employment law and personal injury shop in 2017. It’s now grown to three lawyers—who teamed up to achieve a major win in May 2022 for a school custodian with unlawful termination claims.

“We worked together really well,” Collier said.

A Santa Cruz County Superior Court jury awarded the plaintiff, Braulio Ruvalcaba, $34.5 million against an insurance brokerage and workers’ compensation administrator that allegedly supplied misleading information that caused the school district to believe Ruvalcaba was too badly injured to continue on the job. Ruvalcaba v. Santa Cruz City Schools and Keenan & Associates, 19CV00488 (S. Cruz Co. Super. Ct., filed Feb. 13, 2019).

The city school’s defendant, conceding that discrimination occurred and that Ruvalcaba was wrongly terminated, settled out pretrial for $1 million, Collier said.

“In discovery, we found that Keenan had altered medical reports they sent to the district to make it sound like Mr. Ruvalcaba’s disability from a back injury on the job was worse than it was,” Collier said. “There were medical reports that he could bend and lift, but Keenan changed them so that it looked like he couldn’t.”

The motive was to force Ruvalcaba from his job in order to coerce him to accept a lower workers’ comp payout than he deserved, Collier said. Keenan committed discovery abuses, including the withholding of evidence to the point where Santa Cruz County Superior Court Judge Timothy R. Volkmann struck its summary judgment motion as a sanction. Shortly before trial, and two weeks after the close of discovery, Keenan produced 300,000 pages of documents.

As Collier put it in court papers, “Not only was Plaintiff wrongfully terminated and denied reinstatement, but he has had to experience the humiliation of learning that his workers’ compensation administrator orchestrated the entire thing to save money.”

“The jury deliberated for only three hours before finding for $27.6 million in punitives,” Collier said. “Keenan has already brought in some appellate lawyers, so the battle is far from over.”

In an earlier significant case, Collier and colleagues established that California government entities are subject to PAGA. Sargent v. Board of Trustees of the California State University et al., A153072, A154926 (1st DCA, op. filed March 5, 2021).

The appellate panel also affirmed that the whistleblower plaintiff, Thomas Sargent, was entitled to back benefits—but CSU shorted him $550,000. Collier went back to court and, in May 2022, obtained a contempt finding and a $1,000-per-day fine until CSU complied in full.

Collier spent a week in June teaching deposition and trial skills at a National Institute for Trial Advocacy event in San Francisco. “Using my teaching skills helps me keep my trial skills sharp,” he said. “I’ve been extremely busy, and that’s a good problem to have.”

--John Roemer