Angel D. Chavez Reyes filed his original class action complaint and asserted 12 causes of action against Hi-Grade Materials Co. and Robar Enterprises, Inc. for various Labor Code violations such as overtime, minimum wage, and meal break violations.
Chavez filed a motion for class certification in March 2023. Defendants filed their opposition in July 2023, and Chavez filed a reply soon after. The trial court heard oral argument on Chavez’s motion simultaneously with another class certification motion in a related class action lawsuit filed against defendants. Although the two lawsuits were filed two weeks apart and alleged “nearly identical ‘wage and hour’ claims on behalf of overlapping putative classes,” no party ever moved to consolidate the two cases.
The trial court issued its ruling denying class certification in both cases in August 2023. In short, the court found that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that the proposed class action was manageable; and they also failed to demonstrate the superiority of class adjudication. For all of these reasons, the court denied the “combined motion for class certification” and directed that the two lawsuits “proceed separately as individual claims.”
The trial court also noted in its order that Chavez had also asserted claims for penalties under PAGA, but that the PAGA claims are “not subject to class certification and [are] therefore not addressed in the motion or in this ruling.”
Chavez filed a notice of appeal stating that he was appealing from an “[o]rder denying class certification, immediately appealable under the Death Knell Doctrine.” The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal for lack of jurisdiction in the published case of Reyes v. Hi-Grade Materials Co. CA4/1 – D085178 (April 2025)
The right to appeal in California is generally governed by the “one final judgment” rule, under which most interlocutory orders are not appealable. This rule is a fundamental principle of appellate practice that precludes a party from appealing until there is a final judgment resolving the entire action. Piecemeal disposition and multiple appeals in a single action are oppressive and costly, and a review of intermediate rulings should thus await the final disposition of the case.
The death knell doctrine is a “tightly defined and narrow” exception to the one final judgment rule in the class action context. An order denying class certification is generally not a final judgment, as it leaves the action intact as to the individual plaintiff’s claims.
Under the death knell doctrine, however, an order is appealable if it effectively terminates the entire action as to the class, in legal effect being “tantamount to a dismissal of the action as to all members of the class other than plaintiff.”
Chavez contends the death knell doctrine applies here because the trial court’s August 2023 order denying class certification stated that the action would proceed only as to his individual claims. Defendants dispute this, pointing out that, in addition to his class and individual claims, Chavez also brought representative claims for civil penalties under PAGA.
In response, over a year after filing this appeal, Chavez voluntarily dismissed his PAGA claims without prejudice in the trial court. The Court of Appeal was therefore confronted with a novel jurisdictional question: Can a putative class action plaintiff unilaterally ring the death knell for the entire class and retroactively create appellate jurisdiction by voluntarily dismissing all remaining representative claims long after class certification has been denied?
“We conclude that the answer is no. Chavez is attempting to appeal a nonappealable order, as his PAGA claims remained viable and pending at the time he filed his notice of appeal. His voluntary dismissal of the remaining PAGA claims over a year later was not itself appealable and did not retroactively make the class certification order appealable. We therefore conclude the death knell doctrine does not apply here, and we do not have jurisdiction to entertain Chavez’s appeal from the order denying class certification. Any appeal of the class certification order must now await entry of a final judgment disposing of all claims.”