One of the key issues at class certification is whether plaintiffs have met their burden to establish commonality and predominance: that “questions of law or fact common to class members predominate over any questions...more
Takeaway: When evaluating the fairness of a proposed class settlement, Federal Rule 23(e)(2) requires a district court to take into account, among other considerations, the terms of any proposed award of attorneys’ fees and...more
Several appellate decisions addressed the “implicit” class action requirement of ascertainability during the second quarter of 2023, with the Third, Tenth and D.C. Circuits weighing in. Meanwhile, the Fifth Circuit maintained...more
Takeaway: Federal Rule 23 authorizes representative litigation in the form of class actions that satisfy its various requirements. The policy underlying the rule is efficiency. For example, the numerosity element (Rule...more
Fail-Safe Class Definition. The District of Columbia Circuit reversed a district court’s denial of a class action on the grounds the plaintiffs had proposed an impermissible “fail safe” class—i.e., a class definition for...more
Last month, the D.C. Circuit deepened a circuit split on the issue of fail-safe classes. The decision, In re White, 64 F.4th 302 (D.C. Cir. 2023), rejected a categorical rule against all fail-safe classes in favor of a...more
This week, the Court addresses when individualized issues may preclude class certification, and considers the public’s right of access to court proceedings seeking third-party assistance with criminal investigations. The...more
Data incident lawsuits, especially class actions, have the potential to create significant business disruption, loss of marketplace credibility, civil liability or regulatory exposure. Consequently, companies that experience...more
When you finally reach an agreement to settle a hotly contested class action, you want more than anything for the court to approve your settlement agreement and for the case to be over. But, to get to the end of the case,...more
When negotiating a class action settlement, lawyers on both sides may need to consider whether subgroups within the class need to be separately represented by different counsel. The First Circuit recently reached that...more
The en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit's recent watershed decision in Olean Wholesale Grocery Cooperative Inc. v. Bumble Bee Foods LLC established several significant benchmarks for determining class...more
Over the past 25 years, I have had the good fortune of getting to know and working with both plaintiff and defendant class action lawyers from many states, and to teach class action practice in dozens of local and national...more
A California federal court refused to certify a putative Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) class action in a lawsuit brought by a plaintiff who received one prerecorded call in error after a gym member’s phone number...more
Takeaway: When a district court certifies a damages class action, it often cites the long line of cases holding that, because damages for each class member can be determined after a class action trial on liability,...more
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia analyzed Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(b)(3)’s predominance and superiority requirements for class actions in a recent decision denying a motion to certify a...more
Defense counsel tend to see individualized issues of fact and law when litigating a class action. Plaintiffs counsel, on the other hand, will often look at those same issues and suggest that they apply uniformly across the...more
Takeaway: We have posted a number of articles about whether Rule 23’s predominance requirement can be satisfied when a proposed class includes uninjured class members. See, e.g., D.C. Circuit denies class certification...more
Seyfarth Synopsis: In Handloser v. HCL Technologies LTD, No. 19-CV-1242, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 45183 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 9, 2021), Plaintiffs alleged that an Indian-based company with its U.S. headquarters in California gave...more
On February 2, 2021, the Eleventh Circuit reversed the district court’s denial of class certification for failure to prove an administratively feasible method to identify absent class members. The Eleventh Circuit’s rejection...more
Eleventh Circuit Rejects Administrative Feasibility Requirement: What Does the Future Hold for Ascertainability? As we discussed in our Spring 2017 issue of The Class Action Chronicle, courts have struggled to define the...more
On February 2, 2021, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit issued a significant decision holding that a putative class representative does not need to establish an administratively feasible method to...more
On March 30, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether a damages class action, is permitted by Article III of the Constitution or Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure where the majority of the class has...more
The U.S. Supreme Court granted review last week in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, which presents the question of whether Article III or Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure permits a damages class action where most...more
In a scathing decision by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the Court denied class certification of the Allergan securities class action (“Allergan”). See In re Allergan PLC Sec. Litig.,...more
This week, an Eleventh Circuit panel, in a 2-1 decision, reversed the approval of an incentive payment to the named plaintiff, calling the payment an unauthorized bounty. The case involved a Telephone Consumer Protection Act...more