When Judges Cut PAGA Penalties, How Much Say Do They Really Have?
California's Private Attorneys General Act lets employees sue on behalf of the state to recover civil penalties for Labor Code violations — but judges have always had the power to scale those penalties back if the full amount would be excessive given the circumstances. The question courts kept running into: does that power come with rules, or can a judge use their own judgment about how to cut the number down?
A new decision from California's Fourth Appellate District, Taduran v. James R. Glidewell Dental Ceramics, Inc., answers that question in favor of flexibility. The court made clear there's no required formula for reducing PAGA penalties — a trial judge can choose whatever reasonable approach fits the case, whether that means cutting penalties pay-period by pay-period, or applying the reduction per employee instead.
How the Case Got There
The employee behind the lawsuit had accused his former employer of several wage-and-hour violations. By the time the case reached trial, two issues remained: whether overtime pay was calculated correctly, and whether pay stubs contained the piece-rate details the law requires. The employer's defense on the pay stub issue was that it had technically supplied the missing information — just in a separate document. The judge didn't buy that as a defense to liability, but signaled it would factor into how steep the penalty should be.
Once liability was decided, the numbers got dramatic. The employee argued the maximum penalty math added up to nearly $56 million and pushed the court to leave that figure largely intact. He didn't offer his own suggestion for how much of a discount, if any, was appropriate. The employer took the opposite approach, walking the judge through a detailed, violation-by-violation reduction — arguing the technical nature of the violations justified a steep cut.
The judge landed on $515,955 — a small fraction of what was requested — and explained the reasoning in detail, including reducing certain categories per employee rather than per pay period.
A similar story played out with fees. The employee's attorneys asked for more than $1.5 million; the court awarded roughly half that, mostly by adjusting the fee multiplier rather than questioning the hours logged or hourly rates charged.
What the Appeals Court Said
On appeal, the employee argued the reduction should have followed a per-pay-period structure. The appellate panel disagreed, pointing out that while the statute lays out how to calculate the maximum possible penalty, it says nothing about the method for reducing it. That silence, the court reasoned, means trial judges have room to choose the approach that best fits the facts in front of them — and one court choosing a per-pay-period method doesn't bind another court to do the same.
The appellate court also noted a weakness in the employee's argument: it focused on how large the overall cut was, rather than challenging the specific reasoning the trial court gave for reaching that number. Without engaging the substance, the appeal didn't hold up.
The same logic carried over to attorneys' fees. Because there's no fixed test for how big a fee multiplier should be, and because the trial court had walked through its reasoning step by step, the appellate court found nothing to overturn.
Why This Matters
Taduran is a reminder that trial courts aren't locked into a single method when scaling back PAGA penalties — they can reduce awards however the facts support, whether that's by pay period, by employee, or some other reasonable measure, and the same goes for fee awards. For employers, that's good news when the discretion works in your favor, but it cuts both ways: results depend heavily on how well the facts and equities get presented at the trial court level, since appellate courts are reluctant to second-guess a well-reasoned decision — even a dramatic one.