Recent Trends in Class-Action Consumer Finance Litigation - The Consumer Finance Podcast
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in Spokeo Inc. v. Robins was a game-changer. That decision single-handedly raised the bar for a plaintiff alleging a violation of a consumer protection statute such as the Fair Credit...more
Standing is a major issue in nearly all environmental citizen suit cases. A split panel of the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district court’s award of a $14.25 million Clean Air Act (CAA) penalty against a...more
On April 4, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit joined the Ninth Circuit in holding that a plaintiff lacked Article III standing to prosecute her statutory claims under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)...more
The Supreme Court on Monday signaled to the lower courts that they need to seriously consider the impact of TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, 594 U.S. ___ (2021) when addressing claims for statutory violations that do not result in...more
On June 25, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court decided TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, revisiting some of the Article III standing principles it had set forth in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 578 U.S. 330 (2016), and addressing their...more
On May 26, 2021, the Fifth Circuit reversed a district court’s dismissal of a Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”) putative class action arising from the transmission of a single text message to the plaintiff. The...more
On June 25, 2021, the Supreme Court issued a decision in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, a highly anticipated appeal that we previously covered in our March and December issues last year. In a 5–4 opinion, the Supreme Court...more
Recently, we have written about the “entrepreneurial model” of lawyer-driven class actions and how a case’s entrepreneurial features can give rise to various defenses, including lack of standing. As we’ve explained, where...more
On June 25, 2021, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in TransUnion v. Ramirez, holding that consumer class action claims under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) must allege the actual spread of misleading...more
On June 25, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision in TransUnion v. Ramirez that clarified the injury-in-fact plaintiffs must show to have standing to assert statutory privacy rights in federal court. This follows...more
The Supreme Court further limited consumer lawsuits in TransUnion, LLC v. Ramirez, siding with credit reporting agency TransUnion in a 5-4 decision holding that thousands of consumers improperly flagged as potential...more
Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 136 S. Ct. 1540 (2016), courts have grappled with what constitutes a sufficient injury in fact to satisfy Article III standing requirements. Predominant Issues...more
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on March 30, 2021, in a case that will help clarify when an intangible, nonmonetary injury is sufficiently “concrete and particularized” to give rise to Article III standing. The...more
A recent decision from the Northern District of California — Lopez, et al. v. Apple — highlights the continued impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins in shaping Article III standing...more
On Monday and Tuesday of this week, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit issued a series of decisions addressing the Article III standing of consumer plaintiffs alleging violations of the Fair Debt...more
The Supreme Court has granted certiorari to review a $40 million class action trial judgment for statutory and punitive damages under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and its forthcoming decision later this Term will likely be...more
The Eleventh Circuit, sitting en banc, has vacated a pre-Spokeo “beat the clock” class action settlement for lack of standing post-Spokeo. This decision is reflective of a developing trend in the Eleventh Circuit to...more
On October 28, 2020, the en banc Eleventh Circuit reversed the Northern District of Georgia’s approval of a class settlement, holding that the settlement was invalid because the named plaintiff did not have standing to sue...more
On July 6, the Eleventh Circuit held that two recipients of debt collection letters lacked Article III standing to pursue claims against a debt collection agency under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (“FDCPA”). ...more
On December 16, 2019, the Supreme Court denied DISH Network’s petition for certiorari seeking to overturn a $61 million judgment for Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”) violations based on telemarking calls made to...more
In 2016, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Spokeo Inc. v. Robins, holding that even when Congress has granted parties a statutory right, a procedural violation of that right will not by itself satisfy the “concrete...more
In Frank v. Gaos, the Supreme Court appeared poised to decide a divisive class action issue: whether settlement awards to third-party charities (known as cy pres awards) are valid. On March 20, however, an 8-1 majority...more
On March 20, 2019, in Frank v. Gaos, 586 U.S. ___ (2019), the United States Supreme Court sidestepped a novel question regarding a cy pres class action settlement, instead remanding the case back to the lower courts with...more
In 2016, the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion addressing Article III standing under the U.S. Constitution. See Spokeo v. Robins, ––– U.S. ––––, 136 S. Ct. 1540, 194 L.Ed.2d 635 (2016). The “standing to...more
We have been following the Frank v. Gaos, 586 U. S. __ (2019) class action case, which presented an opportunity for the U.S. Supreme Court to determine the limits on the use of the cy pres doctrine in the context of class...more