California Appellate Tracker

Unless a personal injury plaintiff’s (future) heirs join in the settlement agreement individually, they are not bound by it or by its releases, so money paid to the plaintiff to settle future wrongful death suits is worth only as much as the hold harmless agreement by the now-deceased plaintiff is; moreover, non-settling defendants cannot take advantage of any setoff as… Read More

Defendant’s one-year non-compete clause was illegal and unenforceable under Business & Professions Code 16600 since it sought to bar former employees from soliciting the employment of any other current employees. Read More

A homeowner association’s recorded CC&Rs, which contained a provision granting the association a first-priority lien on an adjoining golf course if for maintenance fees the association paid after the course's owner failed to do so, gave association’s lien priority over a mortgage that was recorded after the CC&Rs but before the fees were paid. Read More

A PAGA pre-suit notice of a Labor Code violation need not meet pleading standards or include evidence, but it must include sufficient detail to give the employer adequate notice of the nature of the violation. Read More

A licensee of an administrative agency may not short-cut the administrative process by filing a court action seeking declaratory relief interpreting the relevant statutes before administrative disciplinary proceedings have been completed. Read More

Extrinsic evidence of trustor’s intent is admissible to shed light on the applicability of the “impossibility limitation” on conditions precedent to dispositions by will or trust. Read More

The 30-day deadline for an employer to petition for administrative mandamus runs from entry of the OSHA Appeals Board’s order denying reconsideration, not from the employer’s receipt of the order. Read More

Plaintiff's loss of its city license to operate a bar after a shooting death on its premises qualified as "loss of use of tangible property that is not physically injured," a loss expressly covered by its commercial general liability policy. Read More

Plaintiffs sufficiently alleged, for purposes of the Alien Tort Statute, that (1) cocoa purchasers’ conduct in paying personal spending money to Ivory Coast growers—despite knowledge of their use of child slave labor—was not ordinary business conduct and (2)  the payments were made from the United States, even though the slave labor itself occurred overseas. Read More

For purposes of Industrial Welfare Commission wage orders, drivers like plaintiff who rented taxicab permits from the defendant are considered employees, not independent contractors, because they are not engaged in employment independent of the defendant; rather, they cannot switch companies without obtaining a new driver’s license from the city due to municipal ordinances. Read More

Statutory one-year lien on a judgment debtor’s personal property is tolled by 11 U.S.C. 108(c), which extends the time for commencing or continuing a civil action on a pre-petition claim against the debtor during the automatic bankruptcy stay. Read More

A new trial may properly be ordered on the sole issue of the comparative fault of various defendants, and the trial court did not abuse its discretion in doing so here when there was much evidence that independent contractor defendant was far more at fault than hirer defendant for failing to warn plaintiff that a circuit breaker was still engaged—yet… Read More

A child whom the decedent raised and held out as his own child (but without ever formally adopting the child) has standing to sue for the decedent's wrongful death. Read More

Plaintiff, whose lawsuit was dismissed after defendant’s demurrer to the complaint was sustained without leave to amend because no opposition was filed, was entitled to mandatory relief from judgment after his attorney admitted fault in the form of ignorance of Code of Civil Procedure’s deadlines for filing an amended complaint. Read More

The probate court did not abuse its discretion in excusing a trustee from liability for breaching a trust, because he acted reasonably and equitably in allowing the trustor’s elderly friend to retain his life estate in the trust property even though he had fallen behind on certain expenses that were supposed to be a condition of the life estate. Read More

An insurer was allowed to deny life insurance coverage based on the insured's failure to provide notice of disability, only if it could show it was actually prejudiced by the lack of notice.  Read More

Plaintiff’s unfair competition claim was pre-empted by FDA regulations governing how the defendant should calculate the protein content of its product, but plaintiff’s similar false advertising claim was not preempted because it accused the defendant of misrepresenting the source of the protein in the product. Read More

Student accused of sexual assault was denied basic due process by university disciplinary board by withholding evidence of antidepressant drugs being taken by the victim until the last minute and barring accused student’s attorney from participating in the proceedings while allowing university’s own counsel to act in a prosecutorial role. Read More

Substantial evidence supported finding by the university that a student had cheated on a biology exam, and since this determination was moreover made by a fair procedure, the trial court incorrectly granted the student’s administrative mandamus petition. Read More

Blind plaintiff alleged a viable claim for disability discrimination when he claimed that defendants’ aggressive unleashed guard dog attacked his seeing-eye dog on a public sidewalk outside their business establishment. Read More