A $55.9 Million Ask, a $516,000 Award: What Taduran v. Glidewell Confirms About PAGA Penalty Discretion

A California trial court had two numbers in front of it: $55.9 million, the statutory maximum the plaintiff's attorneys calculated was owed, and a fraction of that once the court applied its discretion. It landed on $515,965 — a reduction of roughly 99%. On May 26, 2026, the Fourth District Court of Appeal upheld it, and on June 17 the opinion was certified for publication, giving Taduran v. James R. Glidewell, Dental Ceramics, Inc. (G064718) precedential weight beyond Orange County.

For employers who assume a PAGA notice is a math problem — violations times $100 times pay periods times headcount, take the number and start negotiating from there — this case is worth reading closely. It wasn't. The statutory maximum was never the real number. It was the ceiling the court was free to ignore.

What Happened

Abraham Taduran, a former employee of dental products manufacturer Glidewell, brought a representative PAGA action alleging eight separate Labor Code violations. Through competing summary adjudication motions and factual stipulations, liability was narrowed to four: wage statement violations, two flavors of overtime miscalculation, and rest period violations. With liability essentially conceded, the only question left for trial was the size of the penalty.

Taduran's side sought the statutory maximum — approximately $55.9 million in civil penalties, plus more than $1.57 million in attorney's fees calculated with a 1.5 upward multiplier on the lodestar. The trial court instead awarded $515,965 in penalties and $733,440 in fees, applying a negative multiplier to the fee request rather than the positive one Taduran's counsel had asked for.

In explaining the reduction, the trial court pointed to several factors: the violations were technical in nature, the actual harm to Taduran and the workforce was limited, and Glidewell had taken corrective steps once the claims came into focus — correcting its wage statements, moving to fix other violations, and paying employees found to be underpaid. On appeal, Taduran argued the trial court was required to calculate penalties on a strict per-pay-period basis and that a negative fee multiplier wasn't available to a defendant. The Fourth District rejected both arguments, confirming what Labor Code section 2699(e)(2) already says on its face: courts have broad discretion to award a "lesser amount" of civil penalties, and they are not bound to any particular methodology in getting there.

Why This Case Matters Even Though the 2024 Reforms Didn't Apply

Taduran predates California's 2024 PAGA overhaul (AB 2288 and SB 92), so the new statutory caps on penalties for employers who take "all reasonable steps" to comply weren't in play. That's precisely what makes the decision useful: it shows that the underlying judicial instinct the 2024 reforms later codified — reward correction, penalize indifference — was already operating under prior law, purely through the discretion built into section 2699(e)(2).

The 2024 reforms didn't invent this idea; they gave it teeth and a formula. Under current law, an employer that takes "all reasonable steps" to comply with the Labor Code provisions at issue before receiving a PAGA notice or records request can cap recoverable penalties at 15% of the statutory amount. Take those same steps within 60 days after a notice arrives, and the cap rises to 30%. Combine "all reasonable steps" with an actual cure of the violation, and for many claims the penalty for that violation disappears entirely. The statute lists non-exhaustive examples of what counts as reasonable steps: periodic payroll audits with follow-through on the results, written policies that are actually distributed, supervisor training, and prompt corrective action once a problem surfaces.

Taduran shows the same logic applied informally, before the statute made it formal. Glidewell didn't avoid liability — it conceded most of it. What it avoided was a nine-figure penalty, by being able to show the court a record of correction rather than a record of ignoring the problem.

The Employer Lesson

The mistake we see most often in wage and hour exposure reviews isn't willful violation — it's the absence of a paper trail showing that anyone tried to fix anything. A court (or the LWDA, at the settlement table) can't credit compliance steps it can't see documented. "We probably would have caught it eventually" is not a defense; a dated audit, a corrected wage statement, and evidence of payment to affected employees is.

For any employer sitting on a PAGA notice, or auditing pay practices proactively before one ever arrives, the practical steps are the same ones the Taduran court rewarded and the 2024 reform statute now spells out:

• Audit before you're asked to. A periodic payroll and timekeeping review, documented and dated, is the foundation of "all reasonable steps" — both informally, as in Taduran, and formally, under Labor Code section 2699(g)(2) and (h)(2).
• Correct violations promptly and pay what's owed. Waiting-time and derivative penalty exposure compounds the longer a known violation sits uncorrected; timely correction is what separates a technical, narrow violation from a willful one in a court's eyes.
• Document everything. Policies distributed, training conducted, corrective payroll runs, and dates — all of it. The record is the evidence a court or the LWDA will actually weigh.

None of this requires waiting for a demand letter to start. The employers who come out of a PAGA claim looking like Glidewell did — a 99% reduction instead of a nine-figure judgment — are the ones who can show they were already looking for problems before someone else found them first.

This post is provided for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice. Every wage and hour exposure profile is fact-specific — if you've received a PAGA notice or want to understand your organization's exposure before one arrives, contact Wage Counsel Group to discuss a compliance audit.