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This week’s recap examines a recent appellate ruling that provides a nice roadmap for arguing a plaintiff’s theory of damages cannot satisfy Rule 23’s predominance requirement, as well as another district court’s efforts to parse out the contours of standing based on statutory violations post-Spokeo.
How an Individualized Damages Inquiry Can Preclude Certification: …
One of our long-standing objectives for this blog is to provide in-depth analysis of recent court rulings and developing trends that impact class action practice. That remains a driving tenet. In an effort to expand our coverage, we are phasing in a regular Monday column that provides more succinct updates on recent decisions. These short-form…
Frequently, a class action complaint will set forth an elaborate theory of why the defendant’s actions were negligent or wrongful, but fall short when trying to identify how that conduct has harmed the class members. This kind of complaint invites a motion to dismiss on the grounds that the plaintiff has failed to demonstrate constitutional…
Year-end lists are funny things. They take a sort-of arbitrary starting and stopping point, and then they cram a bunch of prejudices into a (usually) arbitrary number of items. And then people take them kind of seriously. But they can be handy ways of catching trends one did not see before. And in a year…
Amending Rule 23 would add clarity to the settlement process and teeth to the protection of absent class members. But to solve the real class settlement process, the Advisory Committee will have to look at why so many weak claims advance so far into litigation.
For the next few months, excepting my usual year-end posts,…
It’s a matter of conventional wisdom that class action settlements rarely benefit absent class members as much as they could. Despite a valid fear of either explicit collusion or bad incentives, courts will often rubber-stamp class settlements that provide wide releases and lucrative attorneys’ fees, but little value to the absent class member. And, over…
I don’t usually do guest posts–Class Action Countermeasures is largely a solo proprietorship–but Adam Schulman of the Center for Class Action Fairness spotted a new settlement tactic out in the wild that proved interesting enough to justify an exception. [Inevitable disclosure, since I have done some work for the Center, I have worked with…
With one or two significant exceptions, I usually write about settlement tactics that don’t work. I do that for two reasons: (1) settlement tactics that work often lead to perfunctory opinions that do not discuss the tactics themselves, and (2) settlement is one of those areas where it’s better to know what to avoid.…
A brief one this week, involving a settlement that did not reach final approval. Dremak v. Iovate Health Sci. Group, Inc., No. 09md2087, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 165225 (S.D. Cal. Nov. 19, 2013) involved an attempted settlement of personal injury class and labeling class actions involving products with hydroxycut [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxycut]. The proposed settlement involved…
