$37.25 Million Settlement for 129 Former Lawrence Livermore Workers After Jury Found Lab Breached Employment Contracts

In late 2008, Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC, the private consortium that had just taken over management of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from the federal government, eliminated more than 400 positions in a sweeping workforce reduction. The vast majority of those cut were long-tenured scientists, engineers, and technical staff who were over 40, with the average age of the plaintiffs around 54 and average seniority near 20 years. Many had spent decades at the lab under employment policies they understood to provide protection against arbitrary termination.

A group of 130 former employees, led by plaintiff Elaine Andrews, sued in Alameda County Superior Court. Their central claim was not just age discrimination but breach of contract: the lab had made specific promises about how layoffs would be conducted, and those promises were broken when Bechtel Corp. and its partners restructured operations after privatization. Workers described the process as sudden, opaque, and contrary to the procedures they had been guaranteed.

Gwilliam Ivary Chiosso Cavalli and Brewer attorneys J. Gary Gwilliam, Randall Strauss, and Robert Schwartz structured the litigation around a group of five test plaintiffs, a common approach in mass employment cases that allows a jury's liability finding to carry over to the broader group. Two separate trials proceeded before Judge Robert Freedman in 2013. The jury in the breach-of-contract trial returned a verdict of $2.73 million for the five test plaintiffs, with individual awards ranging from $242,000 to $853,000. The lab prevailed in the separate age-discrimination trial.

The 2013 breach-of-contract verdict set the factual foundation for the remaining 125 plaintiffs. Months of mediation followed, and in October 2015 the parties announced a settlement of $37.25 million in contract damages covering 129 of the 130 plaintiffs. One plaintiff did not join the settlement. Lawrence Livermore National Security denied any wrongdoing.

The case number assigned in Alameda County Superior Court was RG09453596. The CVN trial record confirms Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe represented the lab throughout the proceedings.