Opinion ID: 4521334
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Ad Hoc Approach

Text: The majority of courts in this Circuit, including the district court below, employ what has been termed an ad hoc approach to the similarly situated inquiry at Step Two. 7 Under this flexible approach, courts consider the (1) disparate factual and employment settings of the individual plaintiffs; (2) defenses available to defendants which appear to be individual to each plaintiff; and (3) fairness and procedural considerations counseling for or against collective action treatment. See, e.g., Buehlman v. Ide Pontiac, Inc., 345 F. Supp. 3d 305, 313 (W.D.N.Y. 2018). Thus, rather than considering the ways in which the opt-in plaintiffs are similar in ways material to the disposition of their FLSA claims, district courts employing the ad hoc factors consider the ways in which the plaintiffs are factually disparate and the defenses are individualized. We question whether the ad hoc approach is consistent with the notion that party plaintiffs are similarly situated, and may proceed in a collective, to the extent they share a similar issue of law or fact material to the 7 The ad hoc approach appears to have originated in Lusardi v. Xerox Corp., 118 F.R.D. 351 (D.N.J. 1987), in the context of an ADEA claim. There, the district court considered collective plaintiffs' disparate employment situations; defendant's defenses and the applicability of the defenses to the instant facts; and, more generally, considerations of fairness [and] efficiency in concluding that collective plaintiffs were not similarly situated at Step Two. Id. at 361-72. 31 disposition of their FLSA claims. First, it is abstract in a way that risks losing sight of the statute underlying it by tend[ing] to explain what the term 'similarly situated' does not mean [rather than] what it does mean. Campbell, 903 F.3d at 1114. Second, its open-ended inquiry into the procedural benefits of collective action invites courts to import, through a back door, requirements with no application to the FLSA, like Rule 23(a)'s requirements of adequacy and typicality and Rule 23(b)(3) requirements of superiority and predominance. Id. at 1115. This flaw undermines what is supposed to be one of the chief advantages of the ad hoc approach, that it is not tied to the Rule 23 standards. Thiessen v. Gen. Electric Capital Corp., 267 F.3d 1095, 1105 (10th Cir. 2001); accord Morgan v. Family Dollar Stores, Inc., 551 F.3d 1233, 1260 n.38 (11th Cir. 2008) (citing cases); Scott, 2017 WL 1287512, at  (employing the ad hoc approach [t]o avoid conflating § 216(b) collective certification with Rule 23). Indeed, as discussed below, the district court's ad hoc analysis in this case suffered from this very flaw. It imported through the back door requirements with no application to the FLSA -- namely, that because there were a relatively large number of opt-in plaintiffs, the similarly situated inquiry mirrored the requirements of Rule 23. 32 See infra Part III.C. We discuss this sliding scale analogy to Rule 23 in more detail.