On May 3, 2022, the California Court of Appeal issued its decision in Shaw v. Superior Court, 78 Cal. App. 5th 245, 2022 WL 1400806 (2022), holding that in cases where two or more pending Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA) actions overlap, the exclusive concurrent jurisdiction rule may justify staying the later-filed cases.
As courts have observed, “nothing in the PAGA statutory scheme forecloses separate but similar actions by different employees against the same employer.” Julian v. Glenair, Inc., 17 Cal. App. 5th 853, 866 (2017). As a result, it is not uncommon for a PAGA action to duplicate claims in a preexisting action, sometimes slightly tweaking the factual allegations or adding additional causes of action.
Defendants in this circumstance often seek to stay the later-filed action(s) while the first-filed action is pending. One such basis for seeking a stay is the exclusive concurrent jurisdiction doctrine, which provides that “where two or more courts possess concurrent subject matter jurisdiction over a cause, the court that first asserts jurisdiction assumes it to the exclusion of all other courts.” County of Siskiyou v. Superior Court, 217 Cal. App. 4th 83, 89 (2013).
In Shaw, the Court of Appeal expressly held that the exclusive concurrent jurisdiction may apply where two PAGA actions simultaneously seek similar relief. Shaw, 2022 WL 1400806, at *1. In doing so, it held that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in staying a later-filed PAGA action, because it “could reasonably conclude” that allowing both actions to proceed “would duplicate court efforts, waste resources, and potentially produce divergent results”—precisely what the exclusive concurrent jurisdiction rule is intended to prevent. Id. at *8.
While Shaw confirms that the exclusive jurisdiction rule is a proper basis for staying a substantially overlapping PAGA action, a stay hardly guarantees that the plaintiff in that action will walk away. To the contrary, the defendant in that circumstance should expect that the later-filing plaintiff may resurface to object to a settlement or restart litigation if the first-filed case cannot proceed (e.g., because it is compelled to arbitration or dismissed on summary judgment because the plaintiff was not an aggrieved employee).
The Shaw decision is unlikely to dramatically impact PAGA litigation because courts were commonly staying subsequent cases under the exclusive concurrent jurisdiction rule already. However, it should give defendants some assurance that they are protected against litigating duplicative PAGA lawsuits simultaneously.
