Wage-and-hour: whether damages were computable on common proof
Certification did not turn on the legal theory. It turned on whether the timekeeping data could produce a class-wide number without individualised inquiry — an empirical question, answerable before anyone moved.
Counsel needed to know, before committing to a certification motion, whether class-wide damages could be computed from the employer’s timekeeping and payroll data using common proof — or whether the claims would fracture into individualised inquiries.
Test the data before the theory
Sample the timekeeping and payroll records to establish what is actually recorded, how consistently, and across which locations and periods.
Take each violation type separately
Rounding, meal and rest, off-the-clock, regular-rate and misclassification each stand or fall on different fields. They are not one question.
Build the common formula, then try to break it
Construct the class-wide computation, then attack it the way a rebuttal expert would — looking for the class member it cannot handle.
Report what will not certify
Say plainly which violation types the data supports on common proof and which do not, so the motion is scoped to what the record carries.
The question underneath the question
Certification briefing is written in the language of predominance and commonality. The economist’s part of it is narrower and more concrete: given this employer’s actual timekeeping and payroll data, can damages be computed for every class member using a common method — or does each one require its own inquiry?
That is not a matter of opinion. It is a property of the data, and it can be established before the motion is filed rather than argued about after.
What the data has to survive
Rounding practices, meal-period records that may or may not reflect what happened, exempt classifications applied inconsistently across locations, and bonus structures that change the regular rate. Each of these either yields to a common formula or it does not.
Where it does not, saying so early is worth more than a model that collapses at the hearing.
Scope set by the data, before the motion
Establishing which violation types the data could and could not support before the motion was drafted, rather than defending a class-wide model that had never been stress-tested against the employer’s own records.
Parties, jurisdictions and identifying facts are altered or withheld. Methods, data volumes and outcomes are not.
Recognise your case in this one?
Tell us which part. We will tell you what was actually decisive in it.