On July 30, 2015, in Yocupicio v. PAE Group, LLC, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that, where a complaint contains class claims and non-class claims, and the class claims do not meet the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005's (CAFA) amount-in-controversy requirement, the amount involved in the non-class claims cannot help satisfy the CAFA jurisdictional amount (No. 15-55878, (9th Cir. July 30, 2015)).

Plaintiff Porfiria Yocupicio filed an action in California state court alleging violations of the California Labor Code. The defendants removed the action to federal court. The plaintiff moved to remand.

The district court denied the motion, holding that it had jurisdiction under CAFA. Nine of the plaintiff's ten causes of action were class claims on behalf of Yocupicio and other employees of the defendants. The tenth cause of action, however, was brought as a non-class representative claim under the California Labor Code Private Attorneys General Act of 2004 (PAGA).

The parties did not dispute that the nine class claims satisfied CAFA's numerosity and minimal diversity requirements. Taken singly or aggregated, however, they did not meet the amount-in-controversy threshold under CAFA. The district court determined that it nevertheless had jurisdiction over the action because the class claims and the PAGA claim together sought more than CAFA's $5 million jurisidictional minimum. Plaintiff appealed.

The Ninth Circuit reversed, holding that the district court erred in including the non-class claim when calculating the amount in controversy under CAFA. The court looked to both the language of CAFA and congressional intent in explaining that courts should aggregate the claims of individual class members in determining the amount in controversy, but "class members" includes only those who fall within the definition of the proposed or certified class in a class action. As the provisions of CAFA do not speak to claims that are not part of the class action itself, courts should not include those claims when calculating the amount in controversy under CAFA.

Without the PAGA claim, the district court would not have had original jurisdiction over the class claims because they did not exceed the amount-in-controversy threshold. It also lacked original jurisdiction over the PAGA claim because of a lack of complete diversity. As a result, the district court did not have original jurisdiction over any of the claims in the action and should have granted the plaintiff's motion to remand back to state court.