The TCPA: Deep Dive: Details, Class Actions, Regulations, and Defense Strategies
On May 28, 2024, Chief Magistrate Judge Donna M. Ryu, of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, certified a class of consumers in an action against Barilla Foods....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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The parties to class action litigation frequently contest whether plaintiffs are entitled to pre-certification discovery aimed at identifying additional or replacement class representatives. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the...more
The Middle District of Florida has denied a motion for class certification, finding the proposed class definition would have created a fail-safe class, the class members were not ascertainable, and the plaintiff’s claims were...more
Recently, the Middle District of Florida denied a motion for class certification, finding that the plaintiff had not sufficiently shown that the putative classes were ascertainable. Sliwa v. Bright House Networks, LLC &...more
In September, Georgetown University Law Center hosted its 13th Annual Global Antitrust Enforcement Symposium and Fordham University School of Law hosted its 46th Annual International Antitrust Law and Policy Conference. Each...more
In the last month, plaintiffs have filed a spate of consumer class actions against manufacturers of cannabis-based products. Specifically, plaintiffs have focused on manufacturers of CBD products, claiming the amount of CBD...more
Takeaway: The ascertainability requirement for class actions has divided both California and federal appellate courts. In Noel v. Thrifty Payless, Inc., --- P.3d ----, No. S246490, 2019 WL 3403895 (CA July 29, 2019), the...more
In a unanimous decision that will make it easier for plaintiffs in California state courts to obtain class certification, the California Supreme Court ruled that the ascertainability requirement for certification of class...more
Although courts across the country agree that “a plaintiff class should not be certified unless membership therein is ‘adequately defined and clearly ascertainable,’” the extent of what a plaintiff must provide to satisfy...more
Some legal commentators and lawyers have pronounced the death of class actions in light of significant changes in the law in the last fifteen years, including the passage of the Class Action Fairness Act and the Supreme...more
BCA Financial Services, Inc. filed a well-supported petition to the Eleventh Circuit today, seeking an interlocutory appeal from the district court’s order certifying the case a against it in Reyes v. BCA Fin. Servs., No....more
Takeaway: The issue of how to treat uninjured class members continues to vex the federal courts. This issue presents both substantive and procedural complexities. Substantively, a class must be defined in objective terms, so...more
On September 26, 2018, the Honorable Judge Robert N. Scola entered an Order denying class certification in a consumer deceptive advertising case. Plaintiffs claimed that the use of the phrase “born in brazil” on containers of...more