You need to read Johnson v. NPAS Solutions, LLC. This recent decision from the 11th Circuit fundamentally changes the rules of obtaining approval for class action settlements. Johnson’s introduction emphasizes that the 11th Circuit is shaking up the way class actions are settled and that the court knows it: “The class-action settlement that underlies this appeal is just like so many others that have come before it. And in a way, that’s exactly the problem.…

On Wednesday, July 29, 2020, the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee held a widely publicized hearing in which representatives questioned CEOs from Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google about allegedly anticompetitive business practices. This hearing had its genesis in a 2017 Yale Law Journal article by Lina Khan, which gave rise to what became known informally as the “hipster antitrust” movement. (Not coincidentally, Khan is advising Rep. David Cicilline, the chairman of the Antitrust Subcommittee, and she…

We have repeatedly mentioned the long-awaited decision in Molock v. Whole Foods Market Group, Inc. from the District of Columbia Circuit. While we hoped this opinion would finally provide some circuit-level clarity about how the Supreme Court’s Bristol-Myers Squibb decision applies in the class action context, the court instead largely dodged this issue. There are good and useful aspects to the decision though, and it leaves open the door to applying Bristol-Myers to class action…

In what appears to be a growing trend, state and federal regulators are launching investigations into the sales practices and administration of 403(b) retirement plans for school districts. Two weeks ago, on January 10, 2020, Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings announced a settlement with Horace Mann Investors, Inc., concluding the state’s multi-year investigation into the facts and circumstances relating to over 120 403(b) retirement accounts opened by teachers in 2016 and 2017. The accounts were…

The Eleventh Circuit last month issued a significant class action opinion in Cordoba v. DirectTV, LLC, vacating a class certified in a TCPA class action and remanding the case.    The issue underlying the court’s decision was whether large parts of the class as certified had standing.  Because the plaintiff did not establish that common issues regarding class members’ standing predominated over individualized issues, class certification could not stand. Plaintiff Cordoba alleged that defendants DirectTV…

Does a state, whose citizens are among the absent class members in a class action settlement, have Article III standing to challenge the supposed unfairness of the settlement? In Chapman v. Tristar Products, Inc., the Sixth Circuit said no. The Trial Court’s Decision Chapman involved a product liability class action against the manufacturer of allegedly defective lids for pressure cookers, which may have exposed users to possible injury. Some of the plaintiffs’ class claims…

Two recent studies by the FTC show that some methods for notifying potential class members of class action settlements are not as effective as courts and counsel might believe. In September, the FTC published a report on two studies it conducted surrounding the effectiveness of combined class certification and settlement notices. The Administrator Study compared characteristics of class action settlement administration, like notice methods and compensation amounts, to the settlement claim filing and payout rates.…