Class Actions Brief Blog

We’ve written previously about courts’ differing approaches to ascertainability — an implicit requirement under Rule 23 that class members must be identifiable. A pending petition for certiorari in Career Counseling Inc. v. Amerifactors Financial Group LLC, No. 24-86 (2024), asks the Supreme Court to resolve some of these differences.

The petition originates with a District of South Carolina order denying class certification in a Telephone Consumer Protection Act case. Career Counseling, a staffing services company, filed a putative class action for alleged TCPA ...

Limiting exposure to future claims is a crucial aspect of settling class action litigation. A recent opinion out of the Northern District of Georgia serves as a reminder that the definitions of settlement classes and released claims in class action settlement agreements warrant close attention.

First, the background. In 2015, a customer filed a putative class action against LGE Community Credit Union, alleging that LGE improperly assessed overdraft fees based on accounts’ available balances instead of customers’ ledger balances, in violation of LGE’s standard member ...

Last September, we wrote about the Ninth Circuit’s opinion in Olean Wholesale Grocery v. Bumble Bee Foods and the court’s decision to rehear the case en banc.  The en banc Ninth Circuit has now waded back into the class certification waters, with mixed results for defendants.  While the en banc court tossed back the panel’s holding that the presence of more than a de minimis number of uninjured class members is fatal to certification, it also clarified certain procedural matters under Rule 23 that may lead to smoother sailing for defendants at the certification stage.

As we ...

The extent to which the presence of uninjured class members may defeat class certification remains unsettled. While, standing alone, the existence of some uninjured class members may not be not fatal (depending on the circuit), just how many is too many to satisfy the predominance requirement of Rule 23(b)(3) is still in flux.

The Ninth Circuit waded into this debate earlier this year in Olean Wholesale Grocery Coop. Inc. v. Bumble Bee Foods LLC. Before the case made its way to the appellate court, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California certified three classes ...

The Fourth Circuit’s opinion in Bell v. Brockett, No. 18-1149 (4th Cir. Apr. 25, 2019), posits that “[d]efendant class actions are so rare they have been compared to unicorns.” But what may be even rarer is an opinion, like Bell, in which a court opines on the fundamental and concerning nature of the district court’s clear errors regarding the appointment of class counsel, but nonetheless decides not to reverse. 

Bell arises from the ZeekRewards.com (“Zeek”) fraud scheme. Zeek offered participants the opportunity to share in revenues generated by Zeek’s supposed ...

After a lively oral argument interrupted eight times by laughter, a unanimous Supreme Court reached a serious holding in Nutraceutical Corp. v. Lambert, No. 17-1094 (Feb. 26, 2019): that Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(f)’s 14-day period for requesting permission to appeal class certification orders cannot be equitably tolled.

The class-action plaintiff in Lambert sued for an alleged violation of the California consumer protection law. Although the district court originally allowed the plaintiff to proceed on behalf of a class, the court later ordered the class decertified. The plaintiff ...