Going through bankruptcy is traumatic enough; doing so and still having your credit report still list your discharged debts as "delinquent" is enough to drive some people to litigation. And that’s how several credit agencies found themselves on the receiving end of a series of Fair Credit Reporting Act class actions.
In this case, the…
Fordham law professor Howard M. Erichson has a new paper up at SSRN on "The Problem of Settlement Class Actions." Based on dicta in the Supreme Court’s opinion in Amchem Products, Inc. v. Windsor, courts have taken to certifying classes for settlement purposes only without worrying about "manageability," that is, whether the…
Today’s case, Critchfield Physical Therapy, P.C. v. Techhealth, Inc., 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13440 (E.D. Mo. Feb. 1, 2013), is a short one, but it contains a valuable lesson.
Critchfield filed a class action against Techhealth. The basis of the lawsuit was not important enough for the court to mention in this opinion. What…
I haven’t commented much about the Supreme Court’s class action docket so far, largely because this year I was more focused on–in my own small way–trying to influence what it would be. But now that my particular efforts are done, I thought I would focus on each of the cases before the Court this Term.
In 1998, the class action plaintiffs’ firm Milberg Weiss filed sued Computer Associates for violating the federal securities laws by lying about its revenues in order to increase its stock price. In a perfectly unremarkable development, it was appointed co-lead counsel of the consolidated class. (Various firms had filed a total of eleven complaints.) …
It turns out that Elizabeth Chamblee Burch is not the only law professor currently worried about adequacy in securities class actions. Boston University law professor David H. Webber has an article in the Northwestern University Law Review on The Plight of the Individual Investor in Securities Class Actions.
While Professor Burch was concerned with…
Georgia Professor Elizabeth Chamblee Burch has an essay out for the University of Cincinnati’s Corporate Law Symposium, in which she argues that institutional investors may have problems serving as adequate class representatives in securities class actions.
As she acknowledges, this is a counter-intuitive position, but that hardly makes it wrong. We have grown…
Today’s case, Espenscheid v. DirectSat USA, LLC (7th Cir. 2012) is a little tricky, procedurally. Three plaintiffs filed an FLSA class action (and collective action) against DirectSat USA, LLC. The Northern District of Illinois originally certified a class, but then decertified it, at which point the plaintiffs each settled on an individual basis.
Now, here’s…
One of the primary problems that vexes class-action scholars is often referred to as the "agency problem" (or, more recently, the "governance problem"). In other words, how do we ensure that the people in charge of a class action (nominally the named plaintiff, really the class counsel) actually serve the interests of…
Ten Cases to Educate You
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