Bryan L. Hawkins 

Originally from Texas, Bryan Hawkins is a veteran labor and employment attorney and managing partner for Stoel Rives’ California offices based in Sacramento. His expertise and experience have consistently achieved favorable outcomes for employers in high-stakes litigation.

Hawkins is the lead attorney for a company being accused of workplace violations of a more serious nature. Hawkins’ client has requested to remain anonymous at this stage of the litigation.

“We got involved with this after they reached out to us about six months or so ago regarding a punitive wage and class action where the plaintiff is alleging that their hourly workers weren’t given breaks, overtime and were asked to work off the clock,” Hawkins said. “We worked with this client for a long time. They’re a great client. They have a good policy in place, and we went to mediation recently within the last week.”

Hawkins said the mediation did not get the issues resolved. So they are currently gearing up for litigation.

He said preparing for litigation means he has clients send him all the documents they have for the past four years regarding policies, including their employee handbooks, any material with meal break policy standards, rest break policies, and reimbursement policies and everything else to do with employee-employer relationships.

“We also always have them send us a list of records from all their current and former employees. This includes items such as timesheets, pay stubs, and things like that so we can take a look and process every bit of evidence and look for flaws and defects that would support these claims, Which we did before the mediation, and we found that the client has done a great job of supporting their employees and complying with California’s law, which is incredibly hard to comply with.”

Hawkins and his team tried to settle their case with the plaintiffs during mediation, but he said their settlement offer was very unreasonable, so he politely said no and is moving forward, evidence in hand, to ask a judge to settle the dispute.

“In court, we’ll exchange discovery, we’ll oppose key players, and at a certain point, the court will be asked to certify the class which we will oppose, and hopefully, it will not get certified,” he said. “That entire process from today on will probably take upward of eight to 12 months.”

—Douglas Saunders