SAN FRANCISCO – A lawsuit that started out as four separate-but-related cases has been sent back to the Alameda County Superior Court from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California at the request of the plaintiffs, but the district court declined to order the defendants to cover the plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees, according to an Aug. 20 ruling.
The District Court said the plaintiffs’ motions for remand and reimbursement of their attorneys’ fees were based on “allegedly improper removal.”
According to the Aug. 20 ruling, the plaintiffs, who all work for American Airlines, “assert negligence and product liability claims based on allegations that the uniforms their employer required them to wear contain harmful chemicals that have caused personal injury.”
Of the four original class actions filed against Twin Hill Acquisition Co. Inc., the first had 98 plaintiffs, the second listed 99 plaintiffs and the other two covered “fewer than 100 plaintiffs” each.
The District Court said in its ruling that the Superior Court “suggested that plaintiffs consolidate the cases into one consolidated complaint to streamline pretrial proceedings – i.e., to avoid multiple hearings and motions.”
Twin Hill removed the cases to the federal court on May 10, claiming that an amended complaint filed in the Superior Court “was a proposal to try all four cases jointly,” but the plaintiffs “contend they never proposed to try the cases jointly and that they filed a single first amended complaint only in an attempt to comply with the order of the Superior Court.”
In addition, the District Court said the removal of the cases “was improper because the existence of federal jurisdiction depends on the operative complaint at the time or removal.”
The plaintiffs said the cases were only consolidated to speed up pretrial proceedings, and four different cases were still in play when the cases were moved from the state court.
The plaintiffs claimed that their attorneys’ fees related to the removal should have been reimbursed “because defendants knew that plaintiffs never intended to try the cases jointly and took advantage of a ‘procedurally defective pleading’ to remove the case, causing undue expense and delay,” the District Court ruling said.
In his order sending the cases back to state court but denying the plaintiffs’ request for payment of their attorneys’ fees, Chief Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero said “while the court found that removal was improper, it does not find that defendants’ basis for removal was objectively unreasonable.”