California judge issues $43.5M judgment against title company for unpaid employee overtime
A Fresno County Superior Court judge has approved a $43.5 million class-action judgment against a Miami-based title company that failed to pay overtime to nearly 400 of its California employees, including about 50 in the Fresno area.
Judge Jeffrey Y. Hamilton Jr. on Wednesday signed the judgment against North American Title Company, now known as Lennar Title Inc.., ending a 15-year fight by the employees and their lawyers to recover overtime wages dating back to April 2003.
“Finally,” said Dana Forsythe, one of the class-action plaintiffs.. “I worked a lot of overtime that I was never paid for.”
Forsythe said the court determined she is owed several thousand dollars.
In all, Hamilton said the workers were owed roughly $22 million in unpaid overtime wages, plus $21 million in interest.
Fresno attorney Stephen R. Cornwell, whose legal firm was one of three involved in the lawsuit, said the judgment against North American Title Company provides much-needed relief for the employees who were incorrectly classified as exempt as a way to get around paying overtime.
“These are extremely hard-working people who worked until 9 or 10 o clock at night,” Cornwell said “This wasn’t just about overtime, this was a hardship on families.”
What the company was accused of doing, Cornwell said, is classifying people as supervisors and managers, jobs that are typically exempt from overtime.
In one instance, an escrow officer was told she was supposed to be supervising her own supervisor. In another case, an escrow officer was told she was the janitor’s supervisor.
During the rush to refinance people’s homes in the early 2000s, escrow officers were working nearly round the clock.
Lawyer Patrick D. Toole of Wanger Jones Helsley said that what struck him the most about the situation is that the employer knew the workers weren’t exempt, yet continued to have them work extremely long hours.
“Our computer data showed that one employee was working 4 a.m. to midnight,” Toole said.
A lawyer representing North American Title/Lennar Title could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Case filed 15 years ago
Filed in 2007, the class action suit was delayed by several issues, including numerous legal appeals by the defendant’s attorneys.
The lawyers representing the employees elected to have a judge decide the case, instead of a jury.
In 2016, Judge Hamilton found in favor of the workers and the process began for determining how much overtime pay the workers were owed.
Lawrence M. Artenian of Wagner, Jones, Kopfman & Artenian said the court used the services of experts and a retired judge in Visalia to serve as the fact-finder in the case.
The retired judge met individually with more than 250 former employees of the company via Zoom or in person. Employees testified to working thousands of hours of overtime while doing their jobs.
Forsythe, a former title company employee, said that when she was hired in 2002, she was told escrow officers were not entitled to overtime. “I was new so I didn’t question it,” she said.
Later on, the company changed their titles to unit managers and were given assistants, if they didn’t have one already. Forsythe said the new job title didn’t change anything about her duties as an escrow officer.
“They were trying to find a loophole to avoid paying us overtime,” she said.
Forsythe, who still works in the escrow industry but for another company, doesn’t’ want people to make the same mistake she did.
“If you are working for an employer who tells you that they can’t pay overtime, but they expect you to work overtime . . . Don’t do it,” she said.
This story was originally published September 1, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "California judge issues $43.5M judgment against title company for unpaid employee overtime."
