The TCPA: Deep Dive: Details, Class Actions, Regulations, and Defense Strategies
The Roundup covers notable class action decisions from federal appellate courts and notable Supreme Court class action cert petitions....more
Life has its disappointments. Sometimes, you think you’ve won a free car, but it turns out that you’ve won only a couple of dollars. And sometimes, you think that an appellate court will clarify a thorny issue of class-action...more
Highlights from this issue include: Ascertainability. The Fourth Circuit reiterated that it imposes an implicit “ascertainability” requirement pursuant to which a class cannot be certified unless a court can readily identify...more
A fax is a fax is a fax… or is it? In a recent ruling in the long-running TCPA junk fax case Career Counseling, Inc. v. AmeriFactors Financial Group, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the statute’s prohibition...more
Post-TransUnion, A Closer Examination of Threshold for Article III Standing- Class action trials are rare. The potential magnitude of an adverse verdict, even when improbable, makes the risks of trial unpalatable for...more
Several appellate decisions addressed the “implicit” class action requirement of ascertainability during the second quarter of 2023, with the Third, Tenth and D.C. Circuits weighing in. Meanwhile, the Fifth Circuit maintained...more
Ascertainability. The Tenth Circuit affirmed it treated ascertainability as a sub-requirement of numerosity, not a standalone criteria. The Tenth Circuit affirmed the denial of certification of a class of college students who...more
On January 20, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed the district court’s decision to certify a class under Title II of the Americans With Disabilities Act (“ADA”), which prohibits public entities...more
Rule 23 does not explicitly require that a court be able to determine who the members are before certifying a class. But judges have found implicit in the Rule a requirement that membership in a defined class be...more
Highlights from this issue include: Affirmative Defenses. The Second Circuit held the district court erred in certifying a class alleging ERISA violations because it did not consider Defendant’s affirmative defenses in...more
On October 5, 2021, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois denied the plaintiffs’ Motion for Class Certification in Morr v. Plains All American Pipeline, LLC 2021 WL 4478660 (S.D. Illinois,...more
A federal district court in Florida denied a plaintiff’s motion for class certification in a putative class action asserting claims on behalf of ticket purchasers against Viagogo, a secondary ticket marketplace platform, for...more
Defense counsel tend to see individualized issues of fact and law when litigating a class action. Plaintiffs counsel, on the other hand, will often look at those same issues and suggest that they apply uniformly across the...more
On February 2, 2021, the Eleventh Circuit reversed the district court’s denial of class certification for failure to prove an administratively feasible method to identify absent class members. The Eleventh Circuit’s rejection...more
Eleventh Circuit Rejects Administrative Feasibility Requirement: What Does the Future Hold for Ascertainability? As we discussed in our Spring 2017 issue of The Class Action Chronicle, courts have struggled to define the...more
The opioid MDL court (the Northern District of Ohio) recently denied class certification to plaintiffs seeking class certification as guardians of individual children diagnosed at birth with neonatal abstinence syndrome...more
Takeaway: Administrative feasibility is not a prerequisite for class certification in the Eleventh Circuit, although it remains a relevant consideration under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(b)(3)’s manageability factor....more
Can a plaintiff represent a class without showing that there’s a feasible way to identify the absent class members? In its recent decision in Cherry v. Dometic Corp., the Eleventh Circuit has become the latest circuit to...more
Ascertainability is an implied prerequisite of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23, which governs class actions. Class representatives bear the burden of establishing that their proposed class is “adequately defined and...more
The Eleventh Circuit has joined the Second, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Circuits in rejecting administrative feasibility as a prerequisite for class certification. The decision reverses unpublished Eleventh Circuit...more
In Cherry v. Dometic Corp., the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals held that, when addressing a motion for class certification, courts may consider whether the named plaintiff has demonstrated an administratively feasible...more
This Tuesday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed course on an emerging trend of case law concerning the ascertainability standard for class actions under Fed. R. Civ. P. 23, holding proof of...more
Earlier this week, the Eleventh Circuit joined the Second, Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth Circuits in rejecting administrative feasibility as a prerequisite to certification under Rule 23, deepening a split with the First, Third,...more
In Vandenberg & Sons Furniture, Inc. v. Alliance Funding Grp., Judge Quist of the District Court for the Western District of Michigan granted in part and denied in part the plaintiff’s motion for class certification arising...more
For more than a decade, United States District Courts have taken a stark approach to the need for appropriate class definitions and ascertainability in federal class actions. Mueller v. CBS, Inc., 200 F.R.D. 227, 233 (W.D....more