In this episode of California Employment News, Weintraub Tobin attorneys Chris Horsley and Ryan Abernethy break down employer obligations related to 401(k) retirement plans, CalSavers, and health benefits.
Watch this episode on the Weintraub YouTube channel.
What “Reasonable Steps” Really Mean in 2026: How California Employers Reduce PAGA and Employment Litigation Exposure
As California employers move through 2026, one thing is clear: employment litigation—and PAGA litigation in particular—is not slowing down.
Despite the highly publicized 2024 PAGA reforms, 2025 became the largest year yet for PAGA LWDA filings. That reality has reset expectations. The reform did not reduce enforcement—it changed how employers must defend these cases.
The new dividing line is no longer simply whether a violation occurred.
It is whether the employer can prove it took all reasonable steps to comply.
While no employer can completely prevent lawsuits, California employers can significantly reduce exposure by focusing on what they can control. The following five steps focus on what can actually work in 2026 for employers that want to reduce risk, cap penalties, and maintain leverage when disputes arise.
1. Prove “Reasonable Steps” Before a PAGA Notice Is Filed
The reformed PAGA statute gives employers something they never truly had before: meaningful penalty reduction tied directly to compliance efforts.
• Employers that can prove they took reasonable steps before receiving a PAGA notice may cap penalties at 15%.
• Employers that attempt to fix issues after receiving notice face substantially higher exposure.
In practice, “reasonable steps” now require more than intent or informal reviews. Employers must be able to demonstrate a repeatable, documented compliance system.
This includes:
By 2026, periodic audits by experienced California employment counsel are no longer a best practice—they are increasingly the baseline for employers seeking to limit PAGA penalties.
2. Document Termination Decisions Accurately and Consistently
Termination decisions remain one of the most common triggers for employment litigation. While California law does not require a termination letter in most cases, providing one that accurately states the reason for separation is often a prudent step.
What matters most is consistency.
Plaintiff’s attorneys routinely compare termination reasons against:
Employers should avoid “softening” termination reasons or mischaracterizing a discharge as a layoff when performance or misconduct is the true basis. When an employer later attempts to explain that the real reason was different, it can appear as though the company is changing its story—damaging credibility at the outset of litigation.
If a termination is for cause, the documentation should say so clearly and accurately with concrete examples.
Common examples include:
Clear, contemporaneous documentation often becomes one of the most important exhibits in early settlement discussions.
3. Use Employment Counsel as a Preventive Compliance Partner
California employment law is highly technical and unforgiving. Employers that treat employment counsel as emergency responders rather than strategic partners often incur greater legal expense over time.
In 2026, sophisticated employers integrate employment counsel into ongoing operations, including:
This approach allows employers to identify and address issues early—before they become expensive class or representative actions—and often reduces total legal spend by avoiding defensive litigation altogether.
4. Invest in Knowledgeable, Empowered HR Leadership
A capable HR professional does more than administer paperwork. In 2026, HR is a critical risk-management function.
Experienced HR professionals:
No organization is immune from employee complaints. The question is whether issues are addressed promptly and professionally—or allowed to fester into litigation.
5. Ensure Ownership-Level Engagement and Accessibility
The most effective step for reducing employment litigation still comes from the top.
In practice, the amount of litigation an organization faces is often inversely proportional to how engaged ownership or executive leadership is with employees. Employers with strong litigation records frequently share common traits: leadership is visible, accessible, and willing to hear concerns.
When employees believe issues will be taken seriously and addressed internally, most disputes never reach a lawyer’s desk. When employees feel ignored or dismissed, litigation often becomes the mechanism they use to be heard.
In 2026, leadership engagement is not just cultural—it is strategic.
Final Thought
California employment litigation has entered a new phase. The question is no longer whether employers can achieve perfect compliance—it is whether they can prove responsible, proactive, and systematic efforts to comply.
For employers willing to invest in preparation, documentation, and leadership engagement, the reformed PAGA statute provides meaningful tools to reduce penalties and control risk. For those who do not, exposure remains as high as ever.
Preparation—not reaction—is what separates employers who manage risk from those who absorb it.
The post What “Reasonable Steps” Really Mean in 2026: How California Employers Reduce PAGA and Employment Litigation Exposure appeared first on California Employment Law Report.
seniorshield.online
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3Tu0nmhieMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3Tu0nmhieM
When I first started writing this book, I thought my parents lost $40,000. That was devastating
enough.
I was wrong.
When we finally tallied everything–when all the fraud claims were filed, when every
unauthorized transaction was documented, when we went through statements going back six
months instead of two, when we checked accounts we didn’t even realize had been
compromised–the real number emerged:
Total Losses Across All Accounts:
If you implement the strategies in this book, you will dramatically reduce your fraud risk. If
fraud does occur, you’ll detect it immediately and minimize damage. You’ll recover faster. You’ll
be prepared.
But you have to do the work.
If you’re not willing to do that, stop reading now. This book can’t help you.
If you ARE willing to do that, keep reading. This book will change your life.
One More Thing
Throughout this book, I’ve changed all account numbers to “123456789” for privacy.
Everything else is real: – Every transaction amount – Every date – Every payee name – Every
detail – Every emotion – Every failure – Every lesson
This isn’t a hypothetical case study.
Because nobody else will.
Let’s begin.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, Alex Karp—billionaire CEO of Palantir Technologies—made a startling prediction that sent shockwaves through the education world. The irony? A man with a philosophy degree from Haverford College, a law degree from Stanford, and a PhD in neoclassical social theory from a top German university just declared that humanities education is doomed in the age of AI.
“It will destroy humanities jobs,” Karp told BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. “You went to an elite school, and you studied philosophy—hopefully you have some other skill, that one is going to be hard to market.”
His prescription? Vocational training. Battery factory workers. Technicians. People who can be “rapidly” retrained for whatever industry needs them next.
But here’s where it gets interesting: The employment data and corporate hiring trends suggest Karp might be spectacularly wrong about the very degree that made him successful.
Let’s start by acknowledging where Karp has solid ground beneath his argument.
The statistics on entry-level professional positions are genuinely concerning for humanities graduates:
The World Economic Forum projects that machines and algorithms could take on more work tasks than humans by 2025, with 85 million jobs potentially eliminated by AI and automation.
Even Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei confirmed during their joint Davos panel that entry-level hiring at their companies was already declining due to AI, with software and coding roles down at both junior and mid-levels.
Karp’s emphasis on vocational skills isn’t just corporate propaganda. The data backs up significant protection for hands-on trades:
Skills requiring physical dexterity, on-site problem-solving, and human interaction in unpredictable environments remain stubbornly resistant to automation. You can’t automate fixing a burst pipe in a 100-year-old building or reading a patient’s non-verbal cues during a medical exam.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found strong growth at community colleges and among trade programs, suggesting students are already voting with their feet toward vocational paths.
The situation for humanities graduates looks particularly grim in China’s competitive market:
When money talks, it’s saying “go technical.”
But here’s where Karp’s thesis falls apart—spectacularly. While he was busy declaring his own educational background obsolete, the world’s leading companies were quietly doing the exact opposite.
The evidence that contradicts Karp is both recent and compelling:
McKinsey just reversed course entirely. The consulting firm’s CEO Bob Sternfels revealed they’re now “looking more at liberal arts majors, whom we had deprioritized” as potential sources of creativity. Why? Because AI models have become expert at problem-solving, but McKinsey needs people who can think beyond “logical next steps.”
BlackRock’s own COO contradicts Karp. Robert Goldstein told Fortune in 2024 that his company was actively recruiting graduates who studied “things that have nothing to do with finance or technology.”
Major tech companies are building humanities divisions:
The editorial director of Google’s NotebookLM—one of their largest AI products—explicitly stated that philosophical and psychological skills are particularly valuable for addressing AI-related questions and fine-tuning conversational tone.
Here’s the stunning reversal in actual employment statistics:
Why? Because while AI eliminated 27.5% of programmer jobs, it only reduced software developer roles (the more design-oriented positions) by 0.3%. The creative, strategic thinkers survived while the code writers got automated.
Perhaps most damaging to Karp’s thesis is what Ravi Kumar S, CEO of IT consulting giant Cognizant (with 350,000 employees), told Fortune:
“We are now going to hire non-STEM graduates. I’m going to liberal arts schools and community colleges.”
Kumar’s reasoning directly contradicts Karp: “I think we’ll need more school graduates in the AI era… AI is an amplifier of human potential. It’s not a displacement strategy.”
His company is hiring more school graduates than ever before in 2025, giving them AI tools so they can “punch above their weight.”
When you dig into what employers say they need versus what they’re getting, the humanities suddenly look essential:
Here’s what Karp conveniently ignores: AI has fundamental limitations that require liberal arts training to overcome.
AI cannot generate original questions. It recombines patterns from training data. Someone needs to ask the right questions to get useful outputs—and that requires broad knowledge across disciplines, exactly what humanities education provides.
AI outputs are plagued by bias and errors. Who identifies algorithmic bias rooted in Western cultural assumptions? Who questions the exclusion of Indigenous knowledge? Who challenges phantom responses? People trained in sociology, history, philosophy, and ethics.
AI lacks judgment about what problems are worth solving. As one Reddit analysis put it: “AI pushes us toward creating more humanistic service roles that demand genuine empathy… machines don’t have hearts.”
Stanford research found the key dividing line: AI struggles with tasks requiring genuine human emotion, creativity, physical dexterity, and ethical judgment. Three of those four are exactly what humanities education cultivates.
The truth is more nuanced than either extreme position suggests.
Entry-level humanities grads without technical skills are facing a brutal job market. The data on this is unambiguous:
A philosophy grad who can’t code, can’t use AI tools, and has no practical skills is in serious trouble. Karp is correct that a pure humanities degree with zero technical augmentation is increasingly unmarketable for entry-level positions.
What the employment data reveals is this: AI is creating a bifurcated job market.
The bottom tier gets automated. Entry-level programmers, data entry clerks, basic content writers, junior analysts—all getting displaced by AI. This is brutal for recent grads trying to get their foot in the door.
The middle tier needs technical skills. Battery factory workers, technicians, vocational specialists—these roles are secure and well-paying. Karp is absolutely right about this tier.
But the top tier increasingly demands humanities thinking. Senior developers who design systems, not just code them. Leaders who can ask the right questions. Ethicists who can prevent AI disasters. Creative directors who envision what doesn’t exist yet. Strategic thinkers who can pivot when industries transform.
And here’s the kicker: That top tier is where the philosophy PhD sits—precisely where Karp himself ended up.
The most successful educational approach combines both:
As one educator put it: “Liberal arts students will need to gain competency on the technical side. But the emergence of AI will also require people who are really thoughtful about: How do we prompt? Should we prompt in certain instances? How do we filter bias?”
Cognizant’s CIO Neal Ramasamy noted that the best programmers he’s hired came from music, philosophy, and literature backgrounds—because with AI handling the mechanical coding, “what’s left is the harder stuff: understanding problems deeply, communicating with stakeholders, and designing solutions that make sense.”
Alex Karp stands on stage at Davos—invited because of his success, credibility, and influence—and declares that the educational path that got him there is worthless.
Think about that logic.
His philosophy degree taught him to think critically about complex systems. His law training gave him frameworks for arguing positions. His PhD in social theory equipped him to understand how societies respond to technological change. These skills enabled him to co-found a company now worth $177 billion.
And his advice to young people is: “Don’t do what I did. Learn to build batteries instead.”
The real message should be: “Do what I did, but also learn to code and use AI tools.”
If you’re choosing an educational path in 2025:
Don’t choose pure humanities without technical skills. The data on entry-level employment is too stark to ignore. You’ll struggle to get your foot in the door.
Don’t choose pure vocational training if you want long-term career flexibility. You’ll be secure in your specific trade, but vulnerable when that industry transforms. And it will transform.
Do choose liberal arts WITH technical augmentation. Study philosophy, but take computer science courses. Major in history, but learn data analysis. Get an English degree, but master AI tools. This combination is what employers are increasingly desperate to find.
As the Globe and Mail put it: “What’s the value of a liberal arts degree? The AI-world answer: exceptionally high and rising.”
But only if you pair it with the ability to actually use the technology transforming the world.
Perhaps the most revealing part of this entire debate is that Alex Karp is using his humanities education to make the argument that humanities education is worthless.
His philosophical training gave him the abstract thinking to envision Palantir. His social theory background helped him understand how governments and institutions work. His ability to articulate complex ideas—honed through years of humanities education—is exactly why people listen when he speaks at Davos.
And now he’s climbing up the ladder and trying to pull it up behind him.
The vocational workers Karp celebrates are essential and deserve respect and good pay. But when those battery factory jobs get automated in 2035 by the next wave of robotics, those workers will need to pivot. And pivoting requires exactly the kind of adaptable, creative, critical thinking that humanities education provides.
Karp is living proof that philosophy graduates can build AI empires. Perhaps instead of declaring humanities doomed, he should be honest about what actually made him successful: a combination of deep humanistic thinking and the technical knowledge to apply it.
That combination—not vocational training alone—is the real future of work in the AI age.
At Zaller Law Group, we do not talk about AI and technology in the abstract. We use it—every day—as a litigation tool to give our clients a measurable advantage.
California wage-and-hour and PAGA cases are data cases. Outcomes often turn on what the time records actually show, how quickly they can be analyzed, and whether counsel truly understands the data. That is why we helped design and deploy Scaled Comp, a software platform our lawyers advised on the software development to analyze large volumes of time and pay data early in a case.
Here are five ways this technology materially benefits our clients.
1. Early, Large-Scale Time Record Analysis Saves Time and Money
Wage-and-hour and PAGA cases routinely involve tens of thousands—or millions—of time entries. Traditionally, this data is not meaningfully analyzed until late in the case, often after months of motion practice, discovery disputes, and mounting legal fees.
Using Scaled Comp, we analyze large volumes of time record data early—often at the outset of litigation. This allows us to identify compliance issues (or confirm compliance) before unnecessary costs are incurred.
Early insight means fewer surprises, tighter strategy, and a more efficient defense from day one.
2. Employers Know Their Potential Exposure—and Their Best Arguments
Data clarity changes everything.
When time records are analyzed early:
This is especially critical in mediation. Parties who understand their data negotiate from a position of strength. Parties who do not are negotiating blind.
Scaled Comp allows us to quantify issues, isolate anomalies, and explain—clearly and persuasively—the story the data actually tells.
3. Stronger “Reasonable Efforts” Arguments Under the Reformed PAGA Law
Under California’s 2024 PAGA reform, employers who can demonstrate reasonable efforts to comply may cap penalties at 15%.
Compliance rates matter. Patterns matter. Documentation matters.
By analyzing time records at scale, we can:
This is not theoretical. It is outcome-driven litigation strategy tied directly to reduced penalty exposure.
4. Lawyers Must Control—and Understand—the Data
Too often, law firms outsource data analysis to third-party “experts” who run numbers in isolation and deliver a report weeks or months later. That approach creates three problems:
At Zaller Law Group, Scaled Comp provides both the report and the underlying data for our attorneys to use and fully understand. This allows our lawyers to dispute differences between data sets in real time—an enormous advantage during negotiations and mediation.
Because Scaled Comp is used in-house:
Your lawyer should be fluent in your records—not waiting on someone else to explain them.
5. Faster Insight Leads to Earlier Resolution—and Better Outcomes
Delays are expensive.
The longer it takes to analyze data, schedule mediation, and meaningfully evaluate exposure, the longer a case lingers, the longer the recovery period continues, and the higher the settlement risk becomes. Prolonged litigation increases legal spend, business disruption, and uncertainty.
By front-loading data analysis:
Clients are better served by efficient resolution—not prolonged process.
Final Thought: AI Is No Longer Optional
This is no longer a debate about whether AI and technology belong in legal practice.
They are here.
Law firms that are not using technology to analyze data at scale are already behind opposing counsel—and are not delivering the strongest possible defense to their clients. Lawyers need to wake up to that reality.
At Zaller Law Group, we use technology strategically, responsibly, and aggressively to protect employers operating in California’s most challenging legal environment.
That is not the future of employment defense.
It is the present.
To learn more about Scaled Comp and how it is used to analyze time and pay data in wage-and-hour and PAGA matters, feel free to contact me or visit www.scaledcomp.com.
The post How Zaller Law Group Uses AI and Technology to Gain a Real Litigation Advantage for Employers appeared first on California Employment Law Report.
GOP defections have sunk one of their party’s labor bills. Politico reports: “A bill that could incentivize employers to offer more training and education programs for their workers narrowly failed on the House floor after several Republicans, including members of the party’s pro-labor wing, defected. Lawmakers on Tuesday voted 215-209 against the Flexibility for Workers Education…
We are already halfway through January. As noted in a prior blog, SB 294 requires all CA employers to distribute a “Know Your Rights” Notice by February 1, 2026. That Notice has now been published in English and Spanish.
The easy part is that this new Notice must be part of your new hire packets going forward.
The harder part is that SB 294 requires CA employers to provide this Notice to each current employee by February 1st, in a manner usually used to communicate employment-related information. That can be by email (if typically used), in a payroll stuffer, or by hand. Whatever way you chose to provide it, you should keep records of what you did.
CA employers are also required to let employees designate a person to be contacted if they are arrested or detained at work (or during work hours but not at the worksite if the employer has actual knowledge of the arrest or detention). If you haven’t already, you can invite your employees to update their Emergency Contact Form, or provide a name to Human Resources for these purposes, as part of your correspondence with this Notice.
Note, you are not required to post the notice, but you certainly can.
An outpouring of support us going to the UAW member who received the bird from President Trump. Business Insider reports: “A Ford employee who was suspended after heckling President Donald Trump has sparked an outpouring of crowdfunding support. The GoFundMe donations, totally over $750,000 in less than 24 hours, come after the Ford line worker,…
Trump was caught on camera today giving the finger to a Ford plant worker. TMZ reports: Donald Trump turned into Donald Grump during a Tuesday appearance at a Ford plant … launching into an F-bomb attack on a worker who appeared to yell ‘pedophile protector’ at the Prez. 47 toured the Ford F-150 plant at…
Unions in Minnesota are making their voice heard in the wake of ICE raids that have left one American dead in the state. CBS News reports: “Faith leaders, union representatives and community members are calling for a Day of Truth and Freedom on Friday, Jan. 23 — urging all Minnesotans not to go to work,…