Mara D. Curtis 

Mara D. Curtis describes her practice as “almost exclusively wage-and-hour class action work” representing employers. To her, it’s an area that is busy, exciting and “always hot,” she said.

She acknowledged that “there are a lot of garden-variety … wage-and-hour claims” being filed. But even the many actions over meal and rest breaks raise a variety of theories, from allegations about staffing issues to disputes about second meal breaks to challenges about how missed meals are reported and tracked on-time records, she said.

To Curtis, wage-and-hour law is fun because it’s precise and statute-based. “You get to get very in-depth on legal issues rather than just factual issues.”

Nor is it static or dull. “There’s always something new under the sun,” she said. Thanks to constant tinkering by the Legislature and especially appellate decisions, California’s law about wages and hours “changes all the time,” she said.

Curtis and her colleagues made an important contribution to those changes a few years ago. The issue was what the plaintiff had to include in the notice of claims she was required to file with the state and the defendant before she could sue under California’s Private Attorney General Act.

In a first-impression decision, the Court of Appeal ruled that the plaintiff had to include sufficient details to give adequate notice of what her claims were about. It wasn’t enough for the so-called PAGA letter to provide “a string of legal conclusions that parroted the allegedly violated Labor Code provisions.” Brown v. Ralphs Grocery Co. Inc., 28 Cal. App. 5th 824 (Cal. App. 2nd Dist., Oct. 31, 2018).

The appellate court left one of the plaintiff’s claims standing. That concerned whether the Ralphs logo on a wage statement met the requirement to include the employer’s legal name. In 2021, the trial court judge ruled that it does. The plaintiff dropped her appeal in December, bringing the case, filed in 2009, to an end.

That final logo issue “was kind of interesting, depending on how into wage-and-hour litigation you are,” Curtis said.

Curtis represented Ryder Last Mile in three class actions in Los Angeles and Florida over whether truckers are employees or independent contractors. The cases raised difficult issues concerning California’s AB 5 standard, joint employer relationships and possible federal preemption. Given the complexities, she settled them relatively quickly. But she has a new case on the trucker misclassification issue now, and she believes more are coming.

More recently, she represented two supermarket companies in three unusual lawsuits claiming wage-and-hour violations on behalf of shoppers. The plaintiffs claim that when they rang up and bagged their groceries at the self-checkout machines, they performed work for the stores and should earn minimum wages. “It’s really interesting from an esoteric legal perspective because there’s not a definition of what it means to be an employee,” Curtis said.

Nonetheless, she obtained sanctions against the plaintiff’s attorney in one of the cases. Baptiste v. Ralphs Grocery Co. Inc., 37-2022-00012259 (S.D. Super. Ct., filed April 4, 2022).

— Don DeBenedictis