Class Action Procedure

A California Superior Court recently certified a putative class action of California residents “who have used mobile devices running the Android operating system to access the internet through cellular data plans provided by mobile carriers.” See Order Concerning: (1) The Parties’ Expert Exclusion Motions; and (2) Plaintiffs’ Class Certification Motion, Csupo, et al. v. Alphabet

We are seeing a growing number of class actions alleging consumer harms from corporate carbon offset policies.  On October 13, a California federal court threw out such a case (albeit with leave to amend) against e-commerce site Etsy.   

The lawsuit, Blackburn v. Etsy, Inc., No. 2:23-cv-05711 (C.D. Cal. 2023), stemmed from a number of carbon offset promises Etsy has made since 2019—that the company engages in “100% offsetting [of] all carbon emissions from shipping[,]” that it was “the first major online shopping destination to offset 100% of carbon emissions generated by shipping[,]” and that its “goal [is] to run a carbon neutral business[.]”  Dkt. No. 20 at 1.  Plaintiffs alleged that the carbon offset promises were false “due to endemic methodological errors and fraudulent accounting on behalf of offset vendors.”  Id.  Plaintiffs claimed that Etsy’s false promises caused them harm because they paid more for products on the site than they otherwise would have under the mistaken belief that Etsy’s shipments were carbon neutral. Continue Reading California Federal Court Throws Out Carbon Offset Class Action Against Etsy

A federal district court in the Northern District of California granted in part a motion to dismiss putative class action claims filed against Western Digital, a hard drive manufacturer whose older devices experienced a cyber-attack, where the plaintiffs alleged that their stored data was deleted but not that it was stolen.  While plaintiffs will be permitted to maintain claims related to the data loss, they lack standing to assert claims based on future data misuse.Continue Reading Federal Court Partially Dismisses Hacked Hard Drive Claims Where Plaintiffs Could Only Show Data Deletion, Not Theft

Courts and litigants continue to grapple with the new frontier of artificial intelligence (“AI”).  One recent case in California demonstrates a new wrinkle in this evolving landscape—the use of AI to aggregate class claims.

Because class settlements bind absent class members who do not object or opt out, Rule 23 requires courts to carefully review and approve them as “fair, reasonable, and adequate.”  An important part of this inquiry is making sure class members are given adequate notice of the terms of the proposed settlement and their rights.  When class members are required to submit claims to access settlement benefits, parties often turn to professional claims administration companies to assist in providing notice and facilitating the claims process.  Under Rule 23, courts closely monitor the information that flows from class counsel and claims administrators to putative class members to make sure it complies with due process.Continue Reading California Federal Court Clamps Down on ‘En Masse’ Class Claims Identified by AI

A significant recent decision by the Fourth Circuit confirms that arbitration agreements that contain class-action waiver provisions can be a powerful tool to defeat class certification.  In In re Marriott International, Inc., the Fourth Circuit observed that while “no court has had occasion to expressly hold as much,” the “consensus practice” of courts is to “resolve the import of waivers at the certification stage—before they certify a class, and usually as the first order of business.”  2023 WL 5313006, at *6 (4th Cir. Aug. 18, 2023).  The Fourth Circuit held that courts must address the implication of an arbitration clause containing a class-action waiver before, not after, a class is certified.  And because the district court in this case did not do so, the Fourth Circuit vacated the district court’s class certification ruling.  Id. at *1.Continue Reading Fourth Circuit Holds that the Enforceability of Arbitration Agreements Containing Class Waivers Must Be Resolved Before Class Certification

In a recent published decision, the Fifth Circuit declined to articulate a rule for the “order and depth in which” it “grapples with constitutional standing and the Rule 23 inquiry.”  Chavez v. Plan Benefit Services, Inc., __ F.4th __, No. 22-50368, 2023 WL 5160393 (5th Cir. Aug. 11, 2023).  The court concluded that the plaintiffs—three employees who participated in health and retirement plans administered by the defendants—had standing to sue on behalf of absent class members who participated in thousands of different benefits plans administered by the defendants.  The court went on to affirm the district court’s certification of two classes, each under both Rules 23(b)(1)(B) and 23(b)(3).Continue Reading Fifth Circuit Declines to Wade Into Circuit Split on Relationship Between Standing and Class Certification

This blog previously covered the Eleventh Circuit’s July 2022 decision in Drazen v. Pinto, which held that all class members must have Article III standing in order to receive individual damages in a class settlement.  41 F.4th 1354 (11th Cir. 2022).  Because the law in the Eleventh Circuit at the time held that a

Rule 23(c)(4) states that, “[w]hen appropriate, an action may be brought or maintained as a class action with respect to particular issues.”  But do classes under Rule 23(c)(4), otherwise known as “issue classes,” also need to satisfy the requirements of Rule 23(a) and (b)?  In Harris v. Medical Transportation Management, Inc., 2023 WL 4567258 (D.C. Cir. July 18, 2023), the D.C. Circuit confirmed that the answer is “yes.” Continue Reading D.C. Circuit Confirms That Issue Classes Must Satisfy the Requirements of Rule 23(a) and (b)

An Illinois federal district court recently concluded that, under the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA), the “citizenship” of a limited liability company is determined by reference to its principal place of business and state of organization. See Calchi v. TopCo Associates, LLC, 2023 WL 3863355 (N.D.Ill. June 7, 2023).

The court originally dismissed plaintiff’s

Pennsylvania law requires foreign corporations to register to do business in the Commonwealth and provides that all registrants are subject to suit on “any cause” in the Commonwealth’s courts, regardless of a connection to the jurisdiction. In a split decision, the Supreme Court reversed a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision finding that this general jurisdiction provision violated the Due Process Clause. Mallory v. Norfolk So. Railway Co., 600 U.S. __ (2023) (slip op. available here).Continue Reading Split Supreme Court Weighs in on Corporate Consent to Personal Jurisdiction