Despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, plaintiffs continue to file class actions, shouldering defendants with potentially massive discovery costs. With the economic slowdown associated with the pandemic, businesses face increased pressure to manage litigation costs like these. One way to manage those costs is to rethink the traditional approach to conducting class action discovery.

Traditionally, courts

 In Thornton v. DaVita HealthCare Partners., Inc., No. 13-cv-00573-RBJ-KMT, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 145458 (D. Colo. Oct. 8, 2013), the plaintiffs filed a class action alleging various causes of action in the wake of a recall of certain brands of dialysis equipment. The case grew rapidly, and eventually involved several consolidated complaints.

The defendants

 Plaintiffs filed a class action complaint against defendant Tournament One Corp. in Nevada state court. Tournament One removed the case to federal court, and immediately filed a Motion to Compel Arbitration and a Motion to Dismiss, or, in the alternative, to stay the case pending the arbitration motion.

In the resulting opinion, Kidneigh v. Tournament

Amber Pieloor filed a class action against her bank, the Gate City Bank of North Dakota. She accused the bank of re-sequencing a number of her financial transactions. Re-sequencing occurs when a bank records transactions in an order other than that in which they were received. Accusing banks of re-sequencing has become common; and

The facts underlying the allegations in Boeynaems v. L.A. Fitness Int’l, LLC, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 115272 (E.D. Pa. Aug. 16, 2012) are hardly remarkable. The plaintiffs allege that they signed up for gym memberships at a chain gym with no problem, but encountered serious difficulties when they later tried to cancel, a fact

Typicality tends to be a useful, if not always used, way of framing various class action issues. Its primary purpose is to ensure that the class action is really a representative lawsuit rather than just an individual case with pretensions. Given the rulings on typicality so far, it’s worth asking how defendants might argue it