The underlying dispute centers on allegations that BD and TechDigital, operating as temporary service employers under California law, failed to pay hourly non-exempt workers minimum wages and overtime, denied required meal and rest periods, issued inaccurate wage statements, and withheld timely final pay — violations plaintiff Delee Vongdara alleged on behalf of a proposed California Class spanning multiple subclasses. BD removed the case from San Diego Superior Court to the Southern District of California under the Class Action Fairness Act.
The complication: a substantially similar class action, Marioara Sipos v. Becton Dickinson and Company, had been pending in San Diego Superior Court since June 30, 2023 — more than a year and a half before Vongdara filed in February 2025. The Sipos action names BD and Pharmigen Inc. as defendants, asserts overlapping California Labor Code claims, and proposes a class of all hourly non-exempt BD employees in California. By the time defendants moved to stay the federal case, the Sipos parties had exchanged discovery and scheduled a mediation for March 31, 2026.
Judge Marilyn L. Huff of the Southern District of California granted the stay on January 27, 2026, working through the Ninth Circuit's eight-factor Colorado River balancing test. Two factors drove the result. On piecemeal litigation, the court concluded that allowing both proceedings to advance simultaneously risked duplicative efforts and inconsistent judgments on nearly identical claims, all governed exclusively by California state law, though it characterized this factor as weighing only slightly in favor of a stay. On order of jurisdiction, the court held that the state action had made substantially more progress — the Sipos plaintiff had been deposed, discovery had been exchanged, and mediation was scheduled — while in the federal case defendants had answered the complaint but nothing further had been done.
The remaining factors were largely neutral. Because the case was removed rather than filed in federal court by plaintiff, the forum-shopping factor did not weigh against a stay. The source-of-law and adequacy-of-state-court factors were also neutral, with the court noting that all claims are purely creatures of California law and that no exclusive federal jurisdiction issue exists. The court held the threshold parallelism requirement satisfied despite TechDigital's absence from Sipos, reasoning that exact parallelism is not required and that Vongdara's own complaint alleged BD and TechDigital are virtually indistinguishable.
Judge Huff also addressed defendants' first-to-file argument but declined to resolve the open question in the Ninth Circuit of whether that doctrine applies when the first-filed case is in state rather than federal court. Because Colorado River independently justified the stay, the court found it unnecessary to decide the issue, while concluding that the first-to-file factors — chronology, party similarity, and issue similarity — also supported staying the federal action.
The stay runs for one year, with a status conference set for or after January 25, 2027.