Employment lawyer for the San Fernando Valley

Your case is probably heard in Van Nuys

Los Angeles County splits its civil work across courthouses, and most Valley employment cases land at the Van Nuys courthouse rather than downtown at Stanley Mosk.

For you that mostly means a shorter drive on the days you have to be somewhere. It is worth knowing because it is one of the first questions people ask and almost nobody puts the answer on a website.

What Valley work looks like, and where it goes wrong

Production and post. Short runs, long days, and pay practices that treat everyone as though they were exempt or freelance. A call sheet is not a contract, and being paid on a 1099 does not make you a contractor. Fourteen-hour days with a meal penalty nobody tracked are extremely common and almost never raised.

Hospitals, clinics and care homes. Shifts where the break happens in theory, meal periods interrupted by a pager, and overtime calculated as though a shift differential were not wages. Healthcare has its own rounding and on-call problems, and they are worth real money across a year.

Warehouses and distribution off the 5 and the 405. Time before the clock, security queues at the end of the shift, and rest breaks that exist on the board but not on the floor.

Restaurants and retail along Ventura. Tip pools that quietly include a manager, split shifts without the premium, and final paychecks that arrive late or not at all.

Deadlines

Every one of these claims has a deadline and usually more than one runs at once. They are shorter than people expect, and they start from when the thing happened rather than when you decided to do something about it.

If you worked for a city, a school district or any public agency, there is a much shorter clock that most people never hear about until it has run out.

What it costs

Nothing to talk to me. If I take the case you pay nothing unless money is recovered for you, and case costs come out of the recovery rather than out of your pocket. If we don't win, you don't pay.