How many plaintiffs does it take to form a class action lawsuit? When it comes to satisfying Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(a)’s “numerosity” requirement, the traditional rule of thumb has been that 40 plaintiffs generally are enough, while 20 are too few. The range in the middle tends to be a closer call. Courts
On December 4, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied plaintiff Joanne Scanno’s attempt to obtain a larger fee award under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The Third Circuit affirmed the District Court’s ruling that a reduction in the fees sought was warranted because not only
Never before has a defendant won a trial in a certified Telephone Consumer Protection Act case. Astonishingly, this losing streak finally came to an end this month in Lyngaas v. Curaden AG, et al., where defendants Curaden AG and Curaden USA convinced the Court during the bench trial of a certified TCPA junk fax
In a win for out-of-network health care providers, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana recently remanded a case to state court, holding that there was no federal question jurisdiction and that the plaintiff’s claims were not preempted by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”), 29 U.S.C. §
On November 12, the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida issued an order granting final approval to a class action settlement in Sanders et al. v. Global Radar Acquisition LLC d/b/a Global HR Research. This settlement resolves the lawsuit filed by Shawana Sanders and Keynatta Williams alleging that Global HR
The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act requires a debt collector to inform consumers of the “name of the creditor to whom the debt is owed” within five days after its initial communication with a consumer regarding a debt. 15 U.S.C. § 1692g(a). And § 1692e(10) prohibits the use of any “false representation or deceptive means
On October 22, a proposed class of over 7,000 former college students filed a lawsuit against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the Department of Education (“DOE”) in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, citing the department’s “enduring refusal to discharge the federal student loans”
On September 12, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed a trial court’s certification of a Rule 23(b)(2) “injunctive relief” class, holding that “because what this ‘injunction’ class really wants is damages—and more precisely, because the injunctive remedy that this class seeks would be improper—the answer to [whether the class is viable]
Recently, the Ninth Circuit affirmed two court rulings denying Samsung’s motion to compel arbitration in Velasquez-Reyes v. Samsung Elecs. Am., and Samsung Elecs. Am. v. Ramirez. In the “shrink-wrap” context, the Ninth Circuit held that a consumer must be given adequate notice of an arbitration provision in order to expressly agree to
Last week, a United States District Court in Washington rejected a proposed TCPA class settlement in part because the class definition included an impermissible characterization of the disputed term of art: automatic telephone dialing system (“ATDS”). A copy of the Order is available here.
This TCPA class action involved allegations that the defendant made
