Posted on April 23rd, 2019
Below is a complete transcript of the video.
What’s going on fellow entrepreneurs? This is John Fagerholm with Defend My Biz.
Today, I want to talk about appealing Labor Board judgments in California. So, the short answer is don’t do it. I mean unless the judgment is so large that it’s worth doing you just can’t do it.
They’ve set it up in a way where once a judgment happens you might as well just consider it final.
Let me tell you what happens. You get a judgment after a hearing, typically 30 days or so after the hearing, and then there’s a notice that says you’ve got 10 days to appeal this judgment.
The appeals don’t happen at the Labor Board. They happen at the Superior Court level. Assuming that even if it’s a hundred thousand dollar judgment, that’s a large number but it still may not be worth appealing.
A guy called me just yesterday, I think it was, and they had a 78 thousand dollar judgment against their company. They showed up without an attorney to defend them.
When they went to the hearing because this person had never worked for them, this person actually worked for a contractor that they had hired to do something for them.
So, they assumed that they could just explain that to the Labor Board and the Labor Board would dismiss the case against them.
Well, that didn’t happen. They got a 78 thousand dollar judgment. They called me, and they said, “Hey, we want to appeal this judgment,” and what I told them is I go, “Okay, we’ve got 10 days to do it.
It’s going to cost you the legal fees for me, and then you have to have a bond before you can even file the appeal for one and a half times what the judgment is, right, so that’s 78 thousand, multiply that 1.5.
You have to have that check in hand before you can even go and file the appeal.” Besides that, only 10% of the appeals are ever favorable to the employer. So, there’s a 90% chance that that one and a half times is just going to go to the employee.
So, besides potentially losing the entire bond if they win even one dollar on their side because now it’s not Labor Board anymore, it’s a Superior Court claim, you’re going to have to pay all the attorney’s fees on the other side.
Now, that 78 thousand dollar judgment could potentially be 200 thousand dollars just depending on how long the case goes.
So, in my opinion, unless there are extenuating circumstances, it just doesn’t make sense to appeal a Labor Board judgment.
Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean those are your only options but let me give you one word of advice.
Labor Board is pro-employee.
Do not go in there without an attorney.
That’s all I’m telling you. It’s just never a good result.
All right, that’s all for today. Thanks, everybody.
Until next time.
