Commercial litigator Brooks Gresham and products liability litigator Trent Taylor bring us some timely thoughts about reliance from a recent decision by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in a food-labeling class action.
Leonardo da Vinci, among many other laudable epithets, has been called “the last person who knew everything,” as…
Class action practice provides plaintiffs with some odd pleading incentives. Two that cause continual problems are the need to keep things vague (in order to emphasize commonalities over any variations that may arise from more specific details) and the need to frame one’s complaint as broadly as possible to maximize the potential recovery in settlement…
Last week, there were two appellate opinions, one from the Seventh Circuit and one from the Tenth, that are worth some attention. They’re worth discussing together as well, because while only one is really helpful for defendants, both discuss different conceptions of how to argue comity in class actions.
The first is Smentek v. Dart…
Officially, I’m still on hiatus. (Although the author-reviewed copy edits for The Class Action Playbook went in to the publisher yesterday.) But today’s article in the Wall Street Journal: "Lawyers Wrestle Over Driver’s Seat in Litigation Against Toyota" deserves a brief post, if only to highlight some of the unusual qualifications plaintiffs’ lawyers are touting…
Often, when a defendant receives a class-action complaint, its first reaction is to see whether or not there are grounds to dismiss the action. (For defendants in federal court, that impulse is particularly acute since the Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which demonstrates little tolerance for purposely vague pleadings.) …
