CA department ordered to pay $8 million in state worker’s disability lawsuit
An appellate court ordered California to pay over $8 million in damages and legal fees this week to a former state employee and her attorneys after she won a disability discrimination case, which the state declined to settle on multiple occasions.
In 2022, a jury awarded Diana Bronshteyn, a Los Angeles County resident, $3.3 million for the Department of Consumer Affairs’ failure to make accommodations based on her needs as someone with fibromyalgia. The state appealed the trial court’s decision. On Wednesday, the state court of appeals in Los Angeles affirmed the lower court’s ruling and awarded Bronshteyn’s legal team nearly $5 million in attorney fees, noting that the state’s insistence on fighting the case was partially to blame for the hefty cost to taxpayers.
“Filing a flood of unselective and fruitless motions can be counterproductive if the plaintiff ultimately prevails, for the bill for that flood will wash up on the defense doorstep. Then the court may look with a wary eye at defense complaints about a whopping plaintiff’s bill,” Justice John Shepard Wiley Jr. wrote in the decision.
Mark Reichel, a longtime defense attorney in Sacramento who was not involved in the case, said it can be difficult to represent clients suing the state. Lawsuits are expensive and time consuming, he said, and while state attorneys are getting a regular paycheck, plaintiffs and their lawyer don’t get paid until the decision comes — and not every case works in their favor.
“The lawyers that work for the state, they’re playing with house money,” Reichel said.
Reichel said $5 million in attorney fees is extremely rare, “but I can guarantee you it’s justified.” He noted that the court uses a formula to calculate those fees, which considers the number of hours attorneys worked, the number of employees on the case, the possible work missed, among other factors. Some of those factors were the subject of litigation in Bronshteyn’s case.
“We always take seriously our obligation to take care to file requests grounded in the facts and the law. The defense of each employment matter is fact dependent, upon the course of the litigation,” an unnamed spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office, which represented the Department of Consumer Affairs, said in a statement.
A 2016 law review analyzing how governments pay for financial sanctions by a University of California, Los Angeles, law professor found that states use “a wide range of budgetary arrangements to satisfy their legal liabilities,” not just their general fund. A Department of Consumer Affairs spokesperson did not respond to questions about which part of the department’s budget was used to pay Bronshteyn’s judgment.
Jean Hyams, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, declined to comment on behalf of Bronshteyn’s legal team.
A disability discrimination case from 2019
Bronshteyn’s case began six years ago when she filed a disability discrimination complaint against the Department of Consumer Affairs, where she previously worked as a program analyst. She alleged the department violated the California Fair Employment and Housing Act when they threatened to fire her while she was on medical leave. Bronshteyn requested a jury trial.
From the outset, even Bronshteyn’s attorneys acknowledge the case was a long shot. According to the decision, Hyams said that there was a “significant risk that the jury might be swayed by the fact that the (Department) permitted (Bronshteyn) to take a long leave of absence and, on paper at least, offered her all of the accommodations she had previously requested.”
Another one of Bronshteyn’s attorneys, Wendy Musell, attempted to settle the case with the department in 2019, the same year it was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, but the state’s lawyers refused to discuss a settlement, according to the appeals court’s decision.
Three years later, Bronshteyn’s team again offered to settle, requesting $600,000 in addition to legal fees, which the department rejected without countering, the decision said.
Shortly after, the case went to trial and the jury awarded Bronshteyn $3.3 million in damages, which the appeals court noted is more than five times the latest settlement offer.
Judgment, plus interest
After the jury’s decision, the department requested a new trial and appealed the verdict. It lost on both accounts, the appeals court reported. Over the next several years, the state and the plaintiff continued the legal fight, much of which centered on how much Bronshteyn’s legal team should be awarded.
Wednesday’s decision by the appeals court is subject to review by the California Supreme Court, Department of Consumer Affairs spokesperson Jonathan Morales said in a statement.
As of Friday afternoon, a review of the case’s docket did not indicate that the department had appealed the case to the state supreme court. Morales declined to comment further, citing pending litigation.
In August, Bronshteyn acknowledged that the state paid her portion of the judgment, a sum that grew to $4.1 million after accounting for interest accrued since the jury’s 2022 decision.
The attorneys fees, which were initially calculated to total $4.9 million, are still accruing interest.
This story was originally published September 19, 2025 at 4:45 PM.
