Unreported / Non-Citable
Background
Tristan Austin worked for Flowers Bakeries Sales of SoCal, LLC, as an hourly, non-exempt employee for about three months in early 2025. He filed a putative class action — a lawsuit that one named plaintiff brings on behalf of similarly situated workers — in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleging six California wage-and-hour violations: failure to pay minimum and overtime wages, denial of accrued paid sick time, inaccurate wage statements, late final wages, and unfair business practices.
Flowers removed the case to federal court under the diversity statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1332, which allows a defendant to move a case from state court to federal court when the parties are citizens of different states and more than $75,000 is at stake. Flowers conceded that Austin’s individual damages would be only about $6,550, but argued that anticipated attorneys’ fees would push the total over the threshold. Austin moved to remand.
The Court’s Holding
The court granted remand. Although attorneys’ fees can count toward the amount in controversy when the underlying statute authorizes them, the removing defendant must still prove the figure with “summary-judgment-type evidence” by a preponderance — not by guesswork.
The court held that Flowers’s fee estimate failed on two independent grounds. First, the projection that Austin’s lawyers would log 124 hours at a $760 blended hourly rate was unsupported. Flowers cited an unrelated out-of-district case in which counsel had charged similar rates, but offered no explanation of why that case was comparable. The Ninth Circuit requires the cited cases to be “similar enough” that one could reasonably expect a similar fee award.
Second, even if the fee estimate were credible, Ninth Circuit law (Gibson v. Chrysler and the more recent Rosenwald v. Kimberly-Clark) bars attributing all attorneys’ fees in a class action solely to the named plaintiff for the amount-in-controversy analysis. Fees must be spread across the class. The court rejected Flowers’s attempts to distinguish those cases — including its argument that the fees were calculated only on Austin’s individual claims — because the suit is in fact a putative class action. Spread across the class, the fees fell well below $75,000.
Because Flowers carried the burden of establishing federal jurisdiction and any doubt is resolved in favor of remand, the court returned the case to state court and denied the company’s pending motion to dismiss as moot.
Key Takeaways
- A defendant removing a putative class action under diversity jurisdiction must show by a preponderance of the evidence — not speculation — that the amount in controversy exceeds $75,000.
- Attorneys’ fee estimates need real, comparable benchmarks; pulling rates from an unrelated case without analysis is not enough.
- In putative class actions, projected attorneys’ fees cannot be loaded entirely onto the named plaintiff for jurisdictional purposes — they must be spread across the class.
- The recent Ninth Circuit decision in Rosenwald v. Kimberly-Clark applies broadly to fee-shifting class actions, not just to Consumer Legal Remedies Act cases.
- Doubts about the right to remove are resolved in favor of returning the case to state court.
Why It Matters
This decision is one of a growing number of California federal court orders rejecting attempts to use anticipated attorneys’ fees as a backdoor into federal court. Wage-and-hour class actions often settle for modest individual amounts, so defendants increasingly try to inflate the amount in controversy by projecting six-figure fee awards. After Rosenwald, district courts are demanding much harder evidence and refusing to attribute class-wide fees to a single named plaintiff.
For California employers, the practical message is that simply pointing to a fee award in a different case will not suffice; removal papers should rely on case-specific data, including the named plaintiff’s individual exposure and a realistic class-wide allocation. For workers and their counsel, the order strengthens the ability to keep wage-and-hour cases in state court, where California-specific labor doctrines often govern and procedural rules are familiar.