If you are forced to prove a key fact at trial after the other party refuses to to simply admit them in response to a request for admission, a California discovery statute entitles you to recover your attorneys’ fees. It doesn’t even matter if you aren’t the prevailing party: when a party should simply admit a fact and refuses, Code of Civil Procedure section 2033.420 requires that party to reimburse the party that was forced to prove it.
Except if the wrongfully-refusing party is an employee. That is the lesson of Cruz v. Calop Bus. Sys. (2D2d. Dec. 26, 2024 No. B337749) (nonpub. opn.). There, an employee lost her wage claims. The employer knew it could not recover its attorneys’ fees under Labor Code section 218.5 unless the employee brought her claims in bad faith. Here, employer failed to prove bad faith.
But employer also noted that it had asked the employee to admit certain key facts, but the employee refused, without good reason. The requests were not objectionable, as employee did not object. Instead, the insisted she “believe[d] she would prevail,” and if she admitted the matters, that would be unfavorable to “ultimate issues in the case.”
But those surely are not good reasons to deny a request for admission. Mere wishful thinking cannot establish a prima facie case. And requests may not be denied merely because they go to “ultimate issues”—to the contrary, section 2033.420 requires that the requests be of “substantial importance.”
Yet the Court of Appeal held that, where requests for admission go to wage claims, section 2033.420 fee reimbursement for wrongful denials are preempted by Labor Code 218.5’s one-way fee-shifting. For this proposition, the court relied on Dane-Elec Corp., U.S. v. Bodokh (2019) 35 Cal.App.5th 761, 764, which held that contractual attorneys’ fees are not available on contract claims that are “inextricably intertwined” with wage claims.
But Dane-Elec did not involve a discovery fee reimbursement statute like section 2033.420. And in that regard, parties may be entitled to fee reimbursement under section 2033.420 even when they are not the prevailing party. All that is required is that the party establish the truth of a question of substantial importance that the other party had no good reason to refuse to admit.
In that regard, while section 2033.420 is not considered a “sanction,” it serves a similar purpose to require litigants who excessively run up expenses by refusing to play by the discovery rules to reimburse litigants their attorneys’ fees. Extending the logic of Dane-Elec to discovery fee statutes, as Cruz does, tends to make employees immune from their discovery misconduct.
