Pagan v. C.I. Lobster Corp.
- Andrew Carter
- 1:20-cv-07349
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 7
In Pagan v. C.I. Lobster Corp., Judge Aaron partly granted and partly denied Pagan’s request to compel wage-and-hour discovery.
Joseph Pagan, the defendant restaurant and individual defendants, and the proposed New York class members whose wage-and-hour records were sought.
What happened
In Pagan v. C.I. Lobster Corp., Joseph Pagan asked the court to require C.I. Lobster Corp. and three individual defendants to provide documents and answers about alleged wage-and-hour violations. Pagan sought information for proposed groups of employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act and New York Labor Law, including records about hours, pay, tip-credit notices, and workplace practices.
The court ordered the defendants to produce specified wage-and-hour and compensation records for the proposed New York class for September 9, 2014, through September 9, 2020, along with documents showing their policies on wage-and-hour notices and reporting time. The defendants also had to provide information about prior employee complaints and people with relevant authority or knowledge. But they could redact class members’ identities and contact information, and they did not have to answer one interrogatory seeking employee identities. The motion was therefore granted in part and denied in part.
Judge Stewart D. Aaron issued the September 17, 2021 order. He required production of the ordered documents and sworn interrogatory responses within 21 days, with appropriate redactions.
The detailed version
- Pagan v. C.I. Lobster Corp. · No. 1:20-cv-07349
- Andrew Carter
- Sept. 17, 2021
Background
Joseph Pagan brought collective and class claims against C.I. Lobster Corp., Joseph Mandarino, Richard Mandarino, and John Mandarino under the Fair Labor Standards Act and New York Labor Law. He alleged that the defendants did not pay him for all hours worked, did not provide adequate notice of a tip credit, and required him to share tips with employees who were not eligible to receive them. Pagan sought to represent a Fair Labor Standards Act collective and a New York class consisting of non-exempt employees in New York.
Pagan served interrogatories and document requests. After the parties could not resolve their disputes, Pagan moved to compel the defendants to provide additional information. A major dispute concerned whether Pagan was entitled to discovery covering the proposed class and collective, before certification of those groups.
Court’s Analysis
The court applied Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26, which permits discovery of nonprivileged information relevant to a claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case. It explained that discovery before conditional certification of a Fair Labor Standards Act collective should be tailored to the plaintiff’s required modest factual showing. Discovery before certification of a Rule 23 class may also be appropriate when it will help determine whether the class-certification requirements are met.
The court found that wage notices, records of hours worked, compensation records, wage statements, tip-credit notices, and descriptions of job duties or titles were relevant to issues such as commonality, typicality, numerosity, whether the class was identifiable, and whether common questions predominated. It limited the production to the period September 9, 2014, through September 9, 2020, and ordered documents sufficient to show the defendants’ policies concerning wage-and-hour notices and reporting time. The court found that several broader document requests were not proportional as written.
The court did not require production of proposed class members’ identities or contact information. It found that Pagan had not shown that communicating with those individuals was necessary to support his class-certification assertions. The defendants could redact that information from documents they had to produce, and they did not have to answer Interrogatory No. 7, which sought the identities of current and former non-exempt employees.
The court rejected the defendants’ objection to a request for prior employee complaints concerning the allegations in the complaint. Those complaints could be relevant to class certification and to whether any violations were willful. The court also rejected objections to interrogatories seeking the identities of people with authority to hire or fire and people who created, implemented, or had unique knowledge about the defendants’ timekeeping and payroll practices.
Disposition
Judge Stewart D. Aaron granted in part and denied in part Pagan’s motion to compel. The defendants were ordered, within 21 days of the opinion and order, to produce the specified documents with appropriate redactions and provide sworn responses to the interrogatories identified in the order.
Read the full 7-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.