'Brinker v. Superior Court': What It Means For Class Action Defendants Generally

Brinker v. Superior Court (Hohnbaum), No. S166360, 2012 WL 1216356 (Cal., April 12, 2012) likely will be remembered as the case in which the California Supreme Court gave welcome relief to a certain kind of California employment class action. If that were all Brinker accomplished, it would stand as a remarkable achievement. But Brinker also holds lessons for class action defendants generally. These are our "Cliff Notes" on the Brinker tutorial.

THE EMPLOYMENT HOLDING AS STARTING POINT

Most of the 54-page unanimous decision concerns itself with employment-related questions, which we leave for others. For our purposes—Brinker's effect on California class action cases generally—we start with the "Meal Period" holding.

California law requires employers to provide meal periods to nonexempt employees. But must the employer merely make them available, or must it "ensure" that employees actually take them, on pain of suffering stiff penalties if they do not? That was the important "merits" issue facing the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court gave this sensible answer: employers do not have to police their employees to make sure that they're actually taking their meal breaks. It is enough that employers make meal periods available; they don't have to "ensure" that employees take them.

It is from this starting point of the Brinker holding that defendants in non-employment class action cases can draw instruction. We see four lessons to be learned.

THE FOUR OTHER LESSONS OF BRINKER

Lesson #1: An "Overbroad" Class Can't Proceed. Brinker's most important lesson concerns what the Supreme Court called the "overbroad" class. An "overbroad" class is one in which the definition embraces large (but often unknown) numbers of class members who have no claim.

Having decided the "merits" issue in favor of the employer, the Supreme Court next had to figure out what to do about the "Meal Period Subclass" that the trial court had certified (whose order of certification the Court of Appeal reversed). After all, the new legal standard meant that the Meal Period Subclass swept in untold numbers of employees having no legal claim. The Brinker court remanded to the trial court to re-determine the issue of certification of the Meal Period Subclass in light of the class definition that would be necessary under the new "allow, not ensure" legal standard. (Slip opn., pp. 50-51.)

Why is this important if you're not a defendant in a "meal period" class action? Because the problem...