On January 10, 2022, the Supreme Court summarily vacated the Fourth Circuit’s order in Rocket Mortgage, LLC v. Alig and remanded the case for reconsideration in light of TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez. (You can read our prior coverage of the TransUnion litigation here, here, here, and here.) While no sweeping inferences should be drawn from the Supreme Court’s two-sentence order, it suggests at a minimum that the Supreme Court views the Article III standing issues addressed in TransUnion as extending beyond the statutory and factual context of that case.

• In Alig v. Rocket Mortgage, LLC (formerly Quicken Loans, Inc.), plaintiffs brought an action on behalf of nearly 3,000 West Virginia mortgagees alleging that Quicken Loans and its affiliate pressured home appraisers to artificially inflate the value of home appraisals. Plaintiffs alleged this conduct violated civil conspiracy laws, the terms of their contracts, and the West Virginia Consumer Credit and Protection Act. Following class certification, the district court concluded that a “statutory penalty” of $3,500 for each mortgage refinancing was appropriate.
• On appeal, the defendants challenged the certification decision on the basis that there were class members who did not suffer any injury and, thus, lacked standing.
• The Fourth Circuit, in an opinion issued three months before the Supreme Court’s TransUnion decision, determined that the class members were injured by the $350 they each paid for a “tainted” appraisal and that whatever benefit they may have gotten from obtaining their home loans may have been outweighed by the harm done from the defendants’ interference in the appraisal process.
• In the TransUnion case, the justices ruled 5–4 that only those members of the certified class who had shown that TransUnion provided misleading consumer reports on them to third parties had demonstrated a concrete reputational harm necessary to press forward with their claims for damages under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, while those who had not alleged such disclosures were barred from proceeding.
• In challenging the Fourth Circuit’s decision, Rocket Mortgage argued that the Fourth Circuit had run afoul of TransUnion when it upheld the nearly $10 million class judgment “even while openly admitting it had no idea whether any class member was actually harmed.”
• The Supreme Court’s vacatur of this decision emphasizes TransUnion’s holding that each member of a certified class must independently meet the standing requirement. It also signals that the Supreme Court views TransUnion as a broadly applicable Article III standing decision—not one that is cabined to the Fair Credit Reporting Act context.

The Fourth Circuit decision is available here. The Supreme Court’s summary order vacating that decision can be read here.