When the numbers ran the other way

The assignment

A former loan agent claimed years of unpaid off-the-clock work. Counsel asked for something narrower and harder than a damages rebuttal: reconstruct the hours the plaintiff had actually worked, from the systems he worked in, and compare that against what he recorded and was paid.

That meant merging timekeeping records against activity data from Method, the loan origination system, and Cisco telephone data, then valuing every discrepancy at the hourly rate in effect at the time, tier adjustments included.

The method

The telephone records gave a call start time and a duration but no end timestamp, so an end had to be derived for every call before the two data streams could be merged. The merged result gave a day-by-day picture of when the plaintiff was actually working.

Daily variance was decomposed into regular, overtime and double-time components rather than netted. The plaintiff’s overtime exposure moved in the opposite direction from his regular-hours exposure, and a single net number would have hidden that.

Rather than pick a favorable assumption, the analysis ran three scenarios and disclosed all three:

• No gap adjustment — plaintiff underpaid $14,920.15

• Gaps of 30+ minutes treated as not working — plaintiff overpaid $20,515.25

• Gaps of 60+ minutes treated as not working — plaintiff overpaid $12,737.93

The outcome

The arbitrator adopted the most conservative figure, to the cent. Final Award, paragraph 10: “Mastan was unjustly enriched by being paid for more hours than he worked in the net amount of $12,737.93.”

The other side produced three different damages numbers from the same data — $33,880.10 from its retained expert, $48,932.19 from counsel, and $50,814.70 in the summation brief. The arbitrator found counsel’s analyses contradicted the claimant’s own expert and were themselves riddled with mathematical and analytic errors.

The plaintiff won on liability and was awarded $15,151.26. Offset against the unjust enrichment finding, the Final Award ordered that LoanMe is awarded, and Mastan shall pay, $3,806.10. Plaintiff’s counsel sought over $600,000 in fees; the arbitrator applied a 70% reduction to the lodestar.

Why it matters

The analysis did not just rebut the plaintiff’s number. It produced an affirmative counterclaim theory the legal team had not considered, survived a week-long hearing and multiple rounds of post-hearing briefing, and was adopted over an opposing retained expert.

A net award against the plaintiff is rare enough that the arbitrator reached for out-of-circuit authority — Singer v. City of Waco and D’Camera v. District of Columbia — to decide how to apply it.

“After spending some time discussing the allegations in the case and the goal of the analysis I was asking him to perform, he produced an alternative analysis that we hadn’t even thought of which gave us a basis to file a cross-complaint against the plaintiff. I am aware that, based on this analysis, an arbitrator recently found that the plaintiff actually owed our client close to $13,000, and also reduced the plaintiffs’ attorney fee award by about 70%.”

— Matthew Golper, then of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips

The Final Award is a public record, filed on the federal docket in Mastan v. LoanMe, No. 8:17-cv-00072-AG-DFM (C.D. Cal.), Dkt. 59-10. Every figure above is checkable against it.

Most matters don't end this way. But every one of them starts with the same question — what do the records actually show? If you have a matter where the numbers need to be reconstructed rather than argued, get in touch with Sheely Consulting.