Legal Aid at Work’s Fight for Unpaid Wages in California
California is one of the most bountiful tracts of land in the world. Despite being home to less than 4% of the farmland in the U.S., it supplies one-third of all vegetables and three-quarters of all fruit and nuts grown in the country. The Central Coast region, which lies just north of Los Angeles, produces a number of premium crops, including lettuce, grapes, and plums, in addition to 35,000 acres worth of strawberries.
While the famed national parks and picturesque beaches might grab the attention of tourists and sightseers, it’s California’s farmland that serves as the lifeblood of much of our country’s food needs. And due to the backbreaking nature of farming all of this output, with scorching temperatures and long hours, not many are willing to sign up for the job.
Although California’s labor laws are considered some of the toughest in the U.S., enforcement remains uneven. This leaves vulnerable workers at risk, particularly in low-wage industries such as agriculture.
As a San Francisco-based nonprofit legal services organization with around 50 staff members, Legal Aid at Work (LAAW) aims to help people understand and assert their workplace rights, and empowers marginalized communities with free clinics, legal information, policy advocacy, and litigation to strengthen the civil and employment rights of low-wage workers in California and across the country.
The Pursuit of Wage Protection
Within these initiatives lies LAAW’s Wage Protection Program, which is dedicated to advocating for fair wages and representing parties that are subject to alleged wage theft across the state. They’ve helped win millions of dollars in settlements for their clients, and have consistently taken on some of the largest corporations in the world.
When it came to a case of 17 farmworkers who filed a suit against Seventh Tree Farm alleging they weren’t fully paid for their efforts during the 2022 harvesting season, LAAW and co-counsel California Rural Legal Assistance jumped at the opportunity. Driscoll’s, which is the world’s largest berry company and turns over billions of dollars in annual revenue, was also named as a joint and client employer in the case.
According to the suit, Seventh Tree Farm promised to pay workers $2.10 for each box of strawberries they picked. However, the plaintiffs allege that Seventh Tree Farm routinely undercounted the number of boxes picked, which resulted in wage theft.
The complaint further alleged that Seventh Tree Farm frequently required employees to work overtime on weekends and failed to pay overtime premiums required by law. Workers were often paid below the minimum wage for their work as well, and managers refused to address these issues despite numerous employee complaints.
Partnering with Everlaw for Good
When the team at LAAW took on the case, they did not have any discovery platform that was regularly used in-house. Discovery was often a fractured and inefficient process that made it difficult to handle some of the more technical cases.
Seeking a better solution for this case, LAAW’s Operations and Technology Manager Scott Neilson began exploring potential ediscovery technologies, with Everlaw for Good quickly distinguishing itself.
“Everlaw was the first to respond to our queries, and their reply felt personal and thoughtful, showing that they had taken the time to review our website and understand our needs,” Neilson said.
Beyond that, the team also appreciated how the use of Everlaw’s versatile, cloud-based platform through the Everlaw for Good program offers free access up to a monthly cap, and heavily discounted rates for larger matters. This helped make Everlaw an ideal fit—particularly for an organization like LAAW that’s mindful of budget constraints.
This was important for the Seventh Tree Farm case specifically, since many of the workers spoke different languages, and documentation wasn’t always comprehensive, which meant the discovery process was going to be complex.
“In this case, all the workers speak Spanish or various indigenous languages,” Kim Ouillette, the Director of the Wage Protection Program at LAAW, said. “This often means that documents received through discovery are in multiple languages, and these language barriers can make these communities harder to reach.”
With Everlaw, Ouillette and her team are able to upload and process different types of data seamlessly, and quickly search through it to understand who was speaking and what they were saying.
Valerie Sprague, a paralegal on the Seventh Tree Farm case, commented that her confidence in her work on the case has grown thanks to Everlaw’s robust metadata tracking and search capabilities, which has allowed her to know when and where documents and emails are coming from by reducing the time spent needing to validate every piece of information.
“When I pull exhibits for a deposition, what usually takes me hours and hours takes no time at all, and it’s all there in a folder for me to look at,” Sprague said. “With Everlaw, the time that’s saved can now be spent serving other clients."
Everlaw’s ability to help LAAW sort hot documents and quickly organize key materials in a deposition helped the team save valuable time. For a nonprofit that handles complex wage theft cases—often involving multiple plaintiffs and hundreds of workers—this means more time can be dedicated to helping additional clients in need.
In fact, Ouillette and her team ended up identifying other people who were victims of similar wage theft through the ease of review and organization that Everlaw offered.
“We used Everlaw to review crew sheets and punch cards workers used to clock in and out,” Ouillette said. “These alone consisted of hundreds of pages of documents. Through these reviews, we were able to identify many other people who were affected by the same issues as the plaintiffs in this case.”
Freedom to Drive Meaningful Change
While the lawsuit against Seventh Tree Farm is still ongoing, with trial scheduled for 2026, having a modern ediscovery solution at their fingertips has the LAAW team feeling more confident in achieving a favorable outcome.
LAAW’s mission of advocating for fair and just labor practices is one of vital importance in a world where inequality continues to grow. Coupled with the rising costs of ediscovery and the complexity of modern legal cases, partnerships like the one with Everlaw for Good can drive meaningful change.
“Everlaw for Good enables legal aid organizations like ours to take on these types of complex cases without private support, and expand our options for what’s possible,” Ouillette said. “We can serve more clients, take on more cases, and help create a fairer legal system.”
