Karla Amezcua worked as a massage therapist at an Eastlake Chula Vista location operated under the Massage Envy brand from August 2011 until she was terminated in December 2019. She sued in January 2022, alleging wrongful termination and a series of Labor Code violations — including an illegal compensation scheme that penalized her for taking legally mandated meal and rest breaks by reducing her hourly rate during those periods. Her original and first amended complaints named only the franchisee, Securecare, Inc., and its sole principal, Robert Perez, along with DOE defendants.
Discovery was protracted and contentious. Securecare initially represented it had no insurance and that documents related to the purchase of the franchise location had been “lost or misplaced.” The real picture did not emerge until December 2024 — after the close of discovery — when Securecare finally produced both a Business Asset and Franchise Purchase Agreement and an employment practices liability insurance policy. The Purchase Agreement, significantly, showed that Massage Envy had approved the 2018 sale and transfer of the franchise, with terms that Amezcua alleged were structured to leave employees unable to recover for wage and hour violations. The insurance policy, meanwhile, revealed a separate Perez-controlled entity as the primary insured, with Securecare covered only as an additional insured.
Armed with these late productions, Amezcua moved in December 2024 to substitute Massage Envy and three other parties for DOE defendants. The trial court granted the motion in January 2025, finding that while Amezcua had always known Massage Envy’s identity as the franchisor, she had not known the facts giving rise to its potential liability. Trial was continued to August 2025. Amezcua filed an amended complaint naming Massage Envy, but the amendment contained no new substantive allegations against it — the body of the pleading was unchanged from the prior version.
When Massage Envy sought to meet and confer about a demurrer in March 2025, Amezcua’s counsel conceded the complaint was factually deficient as to Massage Envy, but declined to amend at that stage, proposing instead to let the demurrer proceed so the trial court could assess both Massage Envy’s legal challenge and any proposed amendment in a single proceeding. Massage Envy filed its demurrer, asserting not only that the pleading lacked sufficient facts but also that Amezcua could not, as a matter of law, establish joint employer liability against a franchisor. Amezcua opposed the demurrer, attached a proposed second amended complaint alleging Massage Envy had developed the compensation matrix governing her pay and had structured the franchise sale to insulate itself from employee liability claims, and asked for leave to amend.
The trial court sustained Massage Envy’s demurrer and granted Amezcua leave to amend — but attached a condition: Amezcua had to pay Massage Envy’s attorney fees and costs incurred in the meet-and-confer process and in preparing the demurrer papers before she could proceed with the amended complaint. The court relied on Code of Civil Procedure section 473, subdivision (a), reasoning that Amezcua had missed at least two earlier opportunities to include substantive allegations against Massage Envy and that her litigation approach was “antithetical” to the purpose of the statutory meet-and-confer requirement. Massage Envy sought $78,668.90; the court found $25,000 reasonable. Amezcua sought writ relief.
The Court of Appeal granted the writ of mandate and directed the trial court to strike the attorney fee payment condition from its order in the published case of Amezcua v. Superior Court Case No. D087216 (April 2026). The court left undisturbed the portions of the order sustaining the demurrer and granting leave to amend; only the fee-shifting condition was invalidated.
Section 473 does not authorize fee-shifting. The court opened with the foundational rule of California attorney fee law: courts may not order one party to pay another’s attorney fees unless a statute specifically authorizes it or the parties have agreed to it. (Code Civ. Proc., § 1021.) Section 473, subdivision (a), the court held, contains no such authorization. Its language permits leave to amend on “terms as may be proper” and, when a trial postponement is required, on “payment to the adverse party of any costs as may be just” — but costs and attorney fees are not the same thing, and the Legislature chose the word “costs,” not “fees.”
The leading treatises had it wrong. The court acknowledged candidly that several authoritative secondary sources — the Rutter Group’s California Practice Guide: Civil Procedure Before Trial, California Jurisprudence, and Witkin’s California Procedure — had interpreted case law to permit fee-shifting under section 473. The court declined to read the precedents so broadly, conducting a careful textual analysis of the two cases those treatises relied upon. Fuller v. Vista Del Arroyo Hotel (1941) 42 Cal.App.2d 400 never mentioned attorney fees at all and could not be read as endorsing them. Williams v. Myer (1907) 150 Cal. 714 referred to “expenses incurred in the employment of attorneys,” but the court found this an oddly oblique way to say “attorney fees” — and concluded the Supreme Court would not have quietly overridden California’s longstanding American Rule (each party pays its own fees) without saying so explicitly. In any event, the court held that whatever Williams may have permitted, it was superseded when the Legislature amended section 473 in 1933 to specifically address payment conditions when trial is postponed, limiting them to “costs,” and simultaneously amended section 1021 to require express statutory authorization for any attorney fee award.
The court confirmed the framework established in Bauguess v. Paine (1978) 22 Cal.3d 626, 639: trial courts have no inherent supervisory power to order payment of attorney fees as a sanction; such authority must come from statute. Statutes that do authorize fee sanctions — Code of Civil Procedure sections 128.5 and 128.7 — were neither invoked by either party nor by the trial court, and their procedural prerequisites (including a 21-day safe harbor and specific findings of bad faith or intent to harass) were never satisfied.