Soto

ORDER RE REQUEST FOR EQUITABLE TOLLING

VINCE CHHABRIA, United States District Judge *1166 As part of their motion for conditional certification, the named plaintiffs in this wage-and-hour suit argued that the Fair Labor Standards Act's statute of limitations should be equitably tolled because the defendant, O.C. Communications, improperly refused to give the named plaintiffs and their attorneys the names and contact information of potential collective members. Although O.C. Communications was almost certainly obligated to produce this information at the time the plaintiffs requested it, it would nonetheless be inappropriate, on the particular facts of this case, to equitably toll the statute of limitations.

A number of district courts in the Ninth Circuit, including many judges in the Northern District, have held that a defendant doesn't need to produce contact information for potential collective members until the court has decided that it is appropriate to send out a court-approved notice to potential collective members - a process unfortunately described as conditional certification of the collective. 1 See Adams v. Inter-Con Sec. Systems, Inc. , 242 F.R.D. 530 , 543 (N.D.…