Stickles v. Atria Senior Living, Inc.

Background

George Stickles and Michele Rhodes worked as “Community Sales Directors” for Atria Senior Living, Inc. and Atria Management Company, LLC. They alleged that the defendants misclassified them and other Community Sales Directors as exempt employees in a wage-and-hour class action.

A prior order certified a class of Community Sales Directors who had not signed arbitration agreements and whom the defendants had classified as exempt outside salespersons. The certification was limited to whether the defendants properly classified the directors as exempt outside salespersons. Certification of the underlying wage-and-hour claims was held in abeyance.

The Motion

The defendants moved to compel the plaintiffs to submit a trial plan showing that the class action would be manageable at trial. They argued that the case lacked common proof and pointed to a lack of data about the directors’ work hours and alleged shortcomings in the plaintiffs’ analysis of a customer-relationship-management database. The database tracked work activities but not hours during the class period.

Court’s Analysis

The court held that federal law does not require a plaintiff to submit a trial plan during or immediately after class certification. Whether a proposed class-action plaintiff must submit such a plan is a forum-specific procedural question.

The court found that the Ninth Circuit decision cited by the defendants was distinguishable because it involved a proposed nationwide class potentially governed by the laws of 48 states. Here, only California law could apply, so the multi-state manageability concern in that decision was not present. The court also ruled that a California Supreme Court decision requiring trial plans did not control because class-action procedure in federal court is governed by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23.

Because the court concluded that a trial plan was not required at this stage, it did not reach the defendants’ other arguments about manageability. The court stated that if the case later proved unmanageable, including at trial, it could decertify the class.

Disposition

Judge William Alsup denied the defendants’ motion to compel a trial plan, Docket No. 49. He denied the plaintiffs’ motion to strike the defendants’ motion, Docket No. 52, as moot. The order addressed class-action procedure and did not decide the underlying employee-classification question.