Certified class of fedex managers is subsequently decertified

United States District Court Judge Janis Sammartino (Southern District of California) granted FedEx's motion to decertify a class of California-based Dock Service Managers.  Weigele v. Fedex Ground Package System, Inc. (S.D. Cal. Apr. 5, 2010) 2010 WL 1337031.  Taking In re Wells Fargo Home Mortgage Overtime Pay Litig. (Wells Fargo II), 571 F.3d 953 (9th Cir. 2009) really seriously, the Court concluded that predominance was lacking.  Perhaps the Court took Wells Fargo II a bit too seriously: "The Court's second reason [for] its finding that common issues do not predominate is that with the substantially decreased importance of Defendant's common classification scheme, the common issues are a relatively minor portion of this litigation."  I don't think that Wells Fargo II said that a common classification scheme should be viewed with substantially decreased importance.  It said that a common classification scheme could not treated as the sole factor used in a certification analysis.  In any event, the Court's changed view was very clear:

[T]he Court is unclear how a jury will be able to sort out the issues placed before it. It appears that they will need to determine whether each testifying witness was or was not exempt and determine to what extent that witness was not provided with mandated overtime, meal, and rest breaks. They will then need to extrapolate from all of the testifying witnesses to the entire class. But it is unclear which the tools they will have to perform that extrapolation. At worst it appears that they would be left to guess. This is too amorphous to expect a reasonable and rational result from any jury.

Order, at 11.

As I said the other day, another misclassification theory, another class that doesn't make the cut.