Plaintiffs, alleged owners of an interest in coalbed methane gas (“CBM”), brought five related putative class actions against defendants, CBM producers, for alleged failure to pay royalties and for a declaration that owners of gas estates – not owners of coal estates – were the owners of CBM. The district court granted plaintiffs’ class certification motions, and defendants appealed. Finding that class certification was “manifestly improper,” the Fourth Circuit granted ... Keep Reading »
14 Days Or Bust: Fourth Circuit Bolsters “Rigid And Inflexible Rule” For Appealing Certification Orders
Artful attempts to appeal a class certification order beyond fourteen days will not impress the Fourth Circuit. In Nucor, the district court certified two classes relating to substantive allegations of racial discrimination. The district court then denied a motion to reconsider, triggering the fourteen day period for filing an interlocutory appeal. Defendants, however, subsequently filed three motions for decertification, and one of them succeeded in part: it ... Keep Reading »
Second Circuit Doubles Down on Rule Preventing Non-Settling Parties from Objecting to Class Settlement
The robustness of the rule preventing non-settling defendants from objecting to a class settlement has received a boost from the Second Circuit. The class settlement at issue involved the claims of investors against a hedge fund manager for damages and restitution of lost funds as a result of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Only one provision of the settlement was at stake: whether the settlement could allow class members to submit to the jurisdiction of the district court for ... Keep Reading »
Courts Reject Attempts to Pick Off Named Plaintiffs Via Offers Of Judgment
Following the Supreme Court’s 2012 recognition of concurrent federal and state jurisdiction over Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”) class actions in Mims v. Arrow Financial Services, federal courts have issued numerous decisions addressing certification of TCPA classes that may be of broader interest to class action lawyers. (By way of example, see our May 20, 2014 post: Ohio District Court Strikes Impermissible "Fail-Safe" Class Allegations.) Two recent TCPA ... Keep Reading »
Court Strikes Class Allegations Against Lender and Foreclosure Service Providers for Failure to Satisfy Rule 23(a)(2)’s Commonality Requirement
The Northern District of Illinois recently granted a motion to strike class allegations prior to class discovery. Plaintiff mortgagor alleged, inter alia, that in foreclosure proceedings, defendants engaged in unfair and deceptive business practices in violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (“FDCPA”) and Illinois Consumer Fraud Act (“ICFA”) by entering and possessing his and putative class members’ homes before the mortgagee had legal possession of the ... Keep Reading »
Issue of Gmail Users’ Consent to Google’s Email-Interception Practices Defeats Class Certification
Google recently scored a big victory in its battle against claims that it is illegally intercepting and scanning the content of emails in order to provide personalized advertisements to Gmail users. Plaintiffs in the various lawsuits – which were consolidated for pretrial purposes in the Northern District of California – sought certification of classes including “education” users, who use Gmail provided by their school, as well as other direct and indirect users ... Keep Reading »
Must Claims Severed From A CAFA Class Action Be Remanded To State Court? The Fifth Circuit Says No.
Following Hurricane Katrina, the State of Louisiana filed a class action to recover under homeowners’ insurance policies that the state had received by assignment through a disaster relief program. The insurers successfully removed to federal court based on CAFA jurisdiction, and challenged the assignability of the homeowners’ contractual rights. Finding that Louisiana law required a policy by policy examination of each anti-assignment clause, the district court ... Keep Reading »