Oh sheet, the background-check forms

A job applicant who suffered no harm, lost no job, and had not one inaccurate line in the background report can still sue the employer who ran the background check, to pursue statutory damages. The damages range from $100 to $1,000, but when multiplied by the number of employees joined in a class action, that single page form suddenly becomes a very expensive sheet in the employee’s file to make a mistake on. Counting by the zeros it might add to the judgment value, it is the literal O-sheet piece of paper, not even funny. Such is the practical lesson of Askins v. CRST Expedited, Inc., No. A172921, June 4, 2026, where the First District held that an employer’s failure to follow the federal "FCRA" (the Fair Credit Reporting Act) rules for the disclosure form is itself the injury, and that no separate harm is needed to sue over it in a California court.

Who Cares About the CARES Act?

With the COVID pandemic in the past, and no new pandemic announced yet, who would be caring today about the “CARES” Act (Pub. L. No. 116-136, 134 Stat. 281 (2020)? I am talking about one of its remaining requirements, the length of an eviction notice, mandated to be at least 30 days for the “covered” properties. Turns out, the tenants, the landlords, and the practitioners care about this issue a lot, on both sides of the docket. Has it expired already or not? The quest to find the answer continues.

SVF Grosvenor Del Rey Corp.: to whom thy payment is made

A landlord who indicates in a pay-or-quit notice that the payment would be acceptable by one of several methods, must insert the full scope of identification for each of the indicated means of payment, even if it sounds repetitive or counter-intuitive. And that identification now means the person to whom the payment is being delivered, not just the person to whom the payment is made. That is the core meaning of the decision in SVF Grosvenor Del Rey Corp. v. Schwarz, No. 25APLC00345, that was published on May 27, 2026. A three-day notice to pay rent or quit that offers a tenant to pay by mail must state the name, telephone number, and address of the person to whom the rent is to be sent, likewise for a personal delivery, even if it is the same person. An incomplete description in one of the methods would sink the entire notice, even if the other methods were flawlessly described, and even if the missing information on the mailing delivery would be a copy of what was indicated for an in-person payment.

Colonial Manor: what to know about the tenant’s wife

Landlord’s duties in drafting an eviction notice and the scope of the burden of proof in the consequent eviction lawsuit just got enlarged by the decision handed down from the Appellate Division of the Los Angeles Superior Court. The case is Colonial Manor, Inc. v. Reyes, No. 24APLC00316, as modified May 19, 2026 (modified opinion PDF). The landlord now has to account for a tenant’s spouse, to see if he or she should be treated as an original tenant, even if the spouse moved in years later.