On Friday April 12, 2019, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court confirmed that plaintiffs seeking to bring class actions asserting Massachusetts Wage Act (“Wage Act”) violations must meet the certification standards set by...more
Seyfarth Synopsis: The Second Circuit will soon decide key issues for FLSA practitioners: whether settlements pursuant to an Offer of Judgment are subject to court review and approval, and whether the standards for final...more
A magistrate judge in the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania denied plaintiff’s motion to strike a Rule 68 offer of judgment served prior to class certification. The Rule 68 offer in this...more
Seyfarth Synopsis: As profiled in our recent publication of the 13th Annual Workplace Class Action Litigation Report, the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings have a profound impact on employers and the tools they may utilize to...more
Relying on the Supreme Court’s 2016 opinion in Campbell-Ewald, the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina ruled that a class action plaintiff need not file a “placeholder” motion to certify to avoid a...more
The 2016 Global Corporate and Transactional Highlights Brochure showcases various deals from across our five-continent platform over the past year. In the ninth year of this annual distribution of deal highlights, the...more
A divided U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled in Campbell-Ewald Co. v. Gomez that an unaccepted settlement offer or offer of judgment is a legal nullity that cannot moot a case. However, the Court left open the possibility...more
Class actions consume considerable company resources and can pose significant risk of exposure in the $ millions or $ billions. Therefore, it is critical for companies to prepare themselves – to know the trends in class...more
Yet another court has found that an unaccepted Rule 68 Offer of Judgment will not moot a putative class action, even where the offer purports to satisfy all of plaintiff’s demands. Plaintiffs sued in the Eastern District of...more
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in Campbell-Ewald Co. v. Gomez on October 14, 2015, an important case presenting the question of whether a defendant can defeat a class action by offering complete individual relief...more
The Rule 23 amendment process has continued apace. For those of you who did not read Paul Karlsgodt’s excellent summary of the September 11 mini-conference (which included a number of class-action luminaries from both sides...more
Rule 23 governs class action procedure in federal courts, and interpretation of that rule by the U.S. Supreme Court and lower federal courts drives risks and liabilities that employers face in high-stakes litigation. Being on...more
This is the ninth edition of The Class Action Chronicle, a quarterly publication that provides an analysis of recent class action trends, along with a summary of class certification and Class Action Fairness Act rulings...more
Just two months before the U.S. Supreme Court hears argument in Campbell-Ewald Co. v. Gomez, two federal circuit court panels have ruled on jurisdictional issues presented in the case. Both the Seventh Circuit in Chapman v....more
In This Issue: - The Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act of 2015 - Class Certification Decisions: ..Decisions Granting Motions to Strike/Dismiss Class Claims ..Decisions Denying Motions to...more
Over the past several years, employers defending wage and other class action lawsuits have increasingly used a procedural move intended to defeat the class claim. In these cases, the employer offers complete financial and...more
On May 18, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in Campbell-Ewald Co. v. Gomez, a Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) class action. The case raises two related questions that are the source of frequent litigation...more
Monday, the United States Supreme Court accepted certiorari to review the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Campbell-Eward Co. v. Gomez, 768 F.3d 871 (9th Cir. 2014), which involved a TCPA class action brought by the recipient of a...more
In the beginning, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Genesis Healthcare that an FLSA case is moot when the plaintiff accepts an offer of full relief. As we noted in our previous blog, the decision left open, however, the...more
Courts look down on offers of judgment in class actions as a procedural trick. Used properly, however, they are an effective early screen for cases that can’t be certified. ...more
I’ve written a little so far about the fact that Rule 23 is likely to undergo revision in the next few years. Last week Judge Robert Michael Dow, who is a member of the Advisory Committee on the Rules of Civil Procedure’s...more
The use of Rule 68 offers of judgment to moot the claims of plaintiffs in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) collective action context has received much attention recently as the courts consider defendants’ use of this...more
Last month, the United States Supreme Court (Supreme Court) provided an unexpected gift to entities facing collective actions under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by holding that defendants may moot such a case by making...more
In a decision that has broad implications beyond its labor law context, the U.S. Supreme Court held on April 16, 2013, that an employee plaintiff in a collective action whose individual claim was mooted by her employer’s...more
In a 5-4 decision issued on April 16, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and held that an unaccepted Rule 68 offer of full relief to a named plaintiff extinguished a putative...more