Class Actions

American Pipe tolling, an equitable doctrine, cannot override the Securities Act’s explicit three-year statute of repose.  Read More

A Court of Appeals lacks jurisdiction to entertain an appeal from a district court order denying class certification or striking class allegations after the named plaintiff has voluntarily dismissed his individual claims.  Read More

Overturning prior precedent, the Ninth Circuit holds that the filing of a class action tolls the statute of limitations for a later class action alleging similar claims.  Read More

CAFA removal jurisdiction is based on the complaint as it stands on the date of removal; plaintiff may not defeat CAFA jurisdiction by amending the class definition post-removal to exclude citizens of other states.  Read More

Plaintiffs’ motion to consolidate their eight lawsuits for pre-trial purposes was not sufficient to transform the lawsuits a removable mass action under the Class Action Fairness Act.  Read More

City settled a class action lawsuit involving garbage fees by returning the money it had charged class members and agreeing not to impose similar charges in the future, so would-be plaintiffs in a second concurrent class action had already received all the relief they sought in that second case for themselves and no longer had standing to proceed.  Read More

An order denying class certification or striking class allegations is not a final or appealable order and is not certifiable for immediate appeal under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(b); instead a party may only seek appellate review under Rule 23(f) or 28 U.S.C. § 1292(b).  Read More

Two nationwide classes were properly certified in a RICO suit alleging that defendants fraudulently collected reimbursement for miscalculated taxes; the plaintiff’s claim was typical as she was harmed by the same scheme as class members, and she proposed adequate methods for proving damages on a classwide basis.  Read More

District court abused its discretion by approving a class action settlement which provided no actual benefit to class members in exchange for release of their FDCPA claims.  Read More

Employer did not violate California’s minimum wage laws by its policies of rounding employees’ work clock times to the nearest tenth of an hour or by allowing employees up to ten minutes uncompensated time before and after shifts in which to clock in or out.  Read More

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 does not require that a plaintiff demonstrate that it is administratively feasible to identify class members as a prerequisite to class certification.  Read More

A Court of Appeals lacks appellate jurisdiction over a order remanding a case that was removed based on federal question jurisdictional grounds, rather than on diversity grounds under CAFA.  Read More

A class was ascertainable and should have been certified since the class was properly defined by objective criteria and its members could be identified from defendant’s records, even if those records also included an unknown number of non-class members.  Read More

Approval of a class action settlement in a case of alleged false advertising of weight loss products is reversed because the claim form misinformed class members as to key aspects of the settlement agreement that had been approved by the court.  Read More

A class notice of settlement need not comply with Civ. Code 1781(d)’s requirement of publication of notice of a CLRA class action once a week for four weeks in the county in which the transaction occurred; that statute only applies in the context of a contested class certification.  Read More

A district judge’s order slashing class counsel’s compensation by 70% in wake of a common fund settlement is overturned for failure to explain adequately the basis for the reduction.  Read More

The local controversy exception to federal CAFA jurisdiction applied in this pollution class action because the plaintiffs sought significant relief from and based their suit in significant part on a nondiverse defendant’s negligence in performing its contract to remediate the diverse defendant’s pollution. Read More

The trial court violated a class action defendant’s due process rights by awarding plaintiffs' attorneys fees based on their time records which the court reviewed in camera and refused to let the defendant see.  Read More

California's general rule requiring automatic disqualification of counsel involved in a simultaneous conflict of interest does not apply to or require disqualification of the counsel for plaintiffs in a class action who drafted a settlement that gave named class representatives an interest in conflict with unnamed class members’ interests.   Read More

Statistical evidence may be used to prove liability in a class action if it would be admissible to prove liability in an individual suit on the same claim.  Read More