Lockett v. Broker Solutions, Inc.

Our team has notched a couple of wins to preserve the full scope of the case.

On June 16, 2022, the Court denied Broker Solutions’ motion for judgment on the pleadings, rejecting its bid to throw the case out. Plaintiff claims that Broker Solutions (doing business as New American Funding) has written commission agreements that violate Labor Code section 2751(a)’s requirement to “set forth the method by which the commissions shall be computed and paid,” because they fail to set forth or disclose its “lean in” policy under which employees may obtain reduced pricing for their customers by accepting a reduced commission. The Court held that, “[v]iewing Labor Code section 2751(a) from a practical standpoint, disclosure of the ‘method’ of computing and paying commissions can reasonably mean that the employee should be able to determine from the written documents whether the agent will receive a commission on a particular transaction when the agent ‘leans in’ and how the amount of the commission in a ‘lean in’ transaction will change from what is set forth in the Commission Formula and the Commission Table.”

On the same day, the Court denied another defense motion that would have reduced the time period covered by the lawsuit. The Court held that the Judicial Council’s Emergency Rule 9, which tolled the one-year statute of limitations on Plaintiff’s PAGA claim for the 178-day period between April 6, 2020 and October 1, 2020, operates to extend the PAGA liability period by 178 days so that the PAGA liability period begins on September 6, 2019 instead of March 2, 2020, when it otherwise would have begun.