Many class-action commentators (including this blog) spend much of their time focusing on class action in federal courts: what caselaw controls, what arguments tend to work.  They spend far less time on what happens to those defendants who–for one reason or another–find themselves in state court.  There are sound reasons for this.  The fifty states

Brussels Antitrust/Competition partner (and English lawyer) Matthew Hall brings us an update on antitrust class actions filed under new procedures in the UK.

Antitrust class actions in the UK are beginning to take hold before the specialist Competition Appeal Tribunal (the “CAT”).  The two filed to date show the possibilities at different ends of the

I’ve been busy this week with a number of things, but a few of them, including the upcoming amendments to Rule 23 and prepping for a Strafford webinar on Thursday, have me thinking about the proper role of objectors again.

I think I’ve mentioned before that a number of class action lawyers (especially on

The long-running battle over collective action waivers in the arbitration clauses of employment agreements continues to rage in the Courts of Appeals.  Two recent decisions (and the cert petitions filed in their wake) may well lead the Supreme Court to consider once again the thorny relationship between the class/collective action mechanism and federal arbitration law.

Often, when a plaintiffs’ counsel seek to certify a class asserting a hard-to-prove financial injury, they will rely on a statistics or economics expert to demonstrate that there has been some kind of “common overcharge” for the product at issue.  This method is extremely common in antitrust class actions, but also shows up increasingly in

In August, while we were all on vacation, beating the heat, or recovering from a busy first half of 2016, the Advisory Committee published the new proposed Rule 23 for public comment.
The proposed changes here fall into several categories:
Notice.  Rule 23’s notice provision gets amended to allow for technological change.
Preliminary

Class actions are not the only form of aggregate litigation. Multi-district litigation (“MDL”), the process by which large numbers of smaller lawsuits are consolidated before a single judge for pretrial purposes, without requiring any kind of certification process, has been around since 1968.  And, as courts have demanded more rigor for Rule 23 certification, MDLs