KMK Law Complex Litigation Blog

The Supreme Court’s recent opinion in TransUnion LLC  v. Ramirez will have a significant impact in alphabet and data breach litigation specifically and class action litigation generally.  We talk about the TransUnion opinion in more detail in the attached Legal Alert.  Anyone who is involved in class action litigation should become familiar with the case as the latest Supreme Court opinion to impact the class action litigation landscape.

This past month, the Supreme Court avoided providing guidance on “cy pres” class-action settlements—instead, it reaffirmed the importance of its Spokeo decision (Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 136 S. Ct. 1540 (2016)) in class action jurisprudence and deferred the complicated cy pres issues for another day.  See Frank v. Gaos, 139 S. Ct. 1041 (2019).[1]

The Court had granted review in Frank to review whether so-called “cy pres” class-action settlements—settlements that distribute monetary relief to public interest organizations instead of the plaintiffs—are proper ...

Giga Watt, Inc. and a related entity got a late Christmas present on December 28: a lawsuit alleging that Giga Watt violated federal securities laws in its initial coin offering (“ICO”). The plaintiff seeks more than $5,000,000.

Last week, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the district court’s approval of the class action settlement in the Target data breach litigation. See In re Target Corp. Customer Data Sec. Breach Litig., 2017 U.S. App. Lexis 1767 (8^th Cir. Feb. 1 2017). 

The Ninth Circuit recently issued a decision that increases the level of antitrust risk exposure faced by companies. 

Last week, the Ninth Circuit deepened the divide among the Circuits regarding ascertainability in class certification. In Briseno v. ConAgra Foods, Inc., 2017 U.S. App. Lexis 20 (9^th Cir. Jan. 3, 2017), the Ninth Circuit rejected the Third Circuit’s line of authority (see Carrera v. Bayer Corp., 727 F.3d 300 (3d Cir. 2013) and Byrd v. Aaron’s Inc., 784 F.3d 154 (3d Cir. 2015)) which requires plaintiffs’ counsel to show ascertainability by demonstrating an administratively feasible and reliable method to determine class membership at the class certification stage.

Last week the Seventh Circuit reinstated the Neiman Marcus data breach class action, holding that plaintiffs had satisfied Article III’s standing requirements based on at least some of the injuries they alleged. In doing so, the Seventh Circuit became the first federal court of appeals to rule on a challenge to the standing of purported data breach victims in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Clapper v. Amnesty International, 133 S. Ct. 1138 (2013), and diverged from the growing majority of federal district courts that have held similar allegations are insufficient to confer standing.

In today’s increasingly data-driven world, compliance with discovery requirements can mean production of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, if not millions. Federal Rule of Evidence 502(d) was enacted to reduce the costs and risks associated with discovery, and to allow a federal court to protect the privilege of documents that have been inadvertently disclosed. Federal Rule of Evidence 502(d) provides that “a federal court may order that the privilege or protection is not waived by disclosure connected with the litigation pending before the court – in which event the disclosure is also not a waiver in any other federal or state proceeding.”

While most ERISA litigators are anxiously awaiting the Supreme Court’s decision in Fifth Third Bancorp v. Dudenhoeffer, (Sup. Ct. Dkt. 12-741), they should also be paying close attention to the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in Halliburton v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc. (Sup. Dkt. 13-317). 

Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued its long awaited decision in American Express v. Italian Colors Restaurant.  The decision is a must read for every business.