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The Researching Paralegal

Category Archives: Class Actions

9th Circuit Overturns Sealed Order Hiding Chrysler Defect – Not Something You See Every Day.

17 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by Celia C. Elwell, RP in 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Appellate Law, Class Actions

≈ Comments Off on 9th Circuit Overturns Sealed Order Hiding Chrysler Defect – Not Something You See Every Day.

Tags

9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Class Actions, Jennifer Bennett, Public Justice Blog, Sealed Court Records

Same Story, New Ending: Court Overturns Order Sealing Chrysler Defect, by Jennifer Bennett, Public Justice Blog

http://bit.ly/1TSR0ab

It’s the same story, over and over again: Corporation conceals deadly defect. Someone dies, and their family sues. Corporation settles quietly. Court records are sealed. Nobody finds out. More people are hurt; more people sue; more settlements are reached; more records are sealed. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This is how GM was able to hide an ignition switch defect that killed over a hundred people for more than a decade. It’s how Remington concealed evidence that its most popular rifle can fire without anyone pulling the trigger. . . .

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A Different Perspective On Mass Torts.

02 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by Celia C. Elwell, RP in Class Actions, Litigation, Torts

≈ Comments Off on A Different Perspective On Mass Torts.

Tags

Class Action, Litigation and Trial Blog, Mass Torts, Max Kennerly, Quantum Meruit, Tort Reform, Transvaginal Mesh Lawsuits

The Lucrative Mass Torts Scam That Wasn’t, by Max Kennerly, Esq., Litigation and Trial, The Law Blog of Plaintiff’s Lawyer Max Kennerly

http://tinyurl.com/pn9oy5z

The lawsuit brought by financier Amir Shenaq against mass-torts law firm AkinMears has made the rounds of the tort reform blogs (e.g., SETexas Record, Daniel Fisher at Forbes, and Paul Barrett at Bloomberg), so I figured some plaintiff-side commentary was in order. The details of the lawsuit confirm what I’ve been saying for years: ‘Mass torts is not an area in which you want to dabble and start throwing around discounts. It’s work, it’s risky, and it can be very, very expensive.’

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Are Cars Safer Now? Unfortunately, Not So Much.

31 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by Celia C. Elwell, RP in Class Actions, Damages, Litigation, Motor Vehicle, Personal Injury, Product Liability, Torts

≈ Comments Off on Are Cars Safer Now? Unfortunately, Not So Much.

Tags

Air Bags, Auto Safety, Car Accident, Guardrails, Honda, Product Liability, Product Recall, Shrapnel, The Pop Tort.com, Toyota, Trinity Industries

The Latest Innovations in Auto Safety: Shrapnel and Harpoons, The Pop Tort.com

http://tinyurl.com/qglxdom

Since when did cars become war zones?

Of course they used to be. Back in the 1950s and 1960s when, during car crashes, ‘Drivers were impaled on rigid steering wheel columns.… Unpadded dashboards and the sharp edges and ashtrays gouged out eyes’ and cars ‘crumpled like a Japanese lantern’ in rollover accidents.  But all that changed when eventually, the auto industry decided that safety ‘sold’ and cars became safer.

But if we’ve learned one thing over the last few years, it’s that with every new safety innovation comes a new opportunity to cut corners.

First to today’s lead story in the New York Times, a tabloid-sounding article called ‘It Looked Like a Stabbing, but Takata Air Bag Was the Killer.’

Hien Tran lay dying in intensive care this month after a car accident, as detectives searched for clues about the apparent stab wounds in her neck.…

When Ms. Tran crashed her car, the air bag, instead of protecting her, appeared to have exploded and sent shrapnel flying into her neck, the Orange County sheriff’s office said. On Monday, in an unusual warning, federal safety regulators urged the owners of more than five million vehicles to ‘act immediately’ to get the air bags fixed.…

But the urgent request was bound to create confusion among owners. Honda said it did not have enough parts to fix the cars immediately. Toyota said it would in some cases disable the air bags, leaving a note not to ride in the front passenger seat.

They’re kidding, right? . . .

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Two 2014 Pivotal Supreme Court Cases on Personal Jurisdiction And Their Lasting Impact on Civil Litigation.

08 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by Celia C. Elwell, RP in Civil Procedure, Class Actions, Federal Civil Procedure, Jurisdiction, Litigation

≈ Comments Off on Two 2014 Pivotal Supreme Court Cases on Personal Jurisdiction And Their Lasting Impact on Civil Litigation.

Tags

Cassandra Burke Robertson, Charles "Rocky" Rhodes, Civil Litigation, Civil Procedure & Federal Courts Blog, Class Action, Daimler AG v. Bauman, Jurisdiction, Personal Jurisdiction, Robin Effron, SSRN, Walden v. Fiore

Rhodes and Robertson on the New PJ Decisions, by Robin Effron, Civil Procedure & Federal Courts Blog

http://tinyurl.com/kbepuyd

Interesting implications for both state and federal civil litigation. This article deserves thoughtful study. -CCE

Charles “Rocky” Rhodes (South Texas College of Law) and Cassandra Burke Robertson (Case Western) have posted Toward a New Equilibrium in Personal Jurisdiction to SSRN.

In early 2014, the Supreme Court decided two new personal jurisdiction cases that will have a deep and wide-ranging impact on civil litigation in the coming decades: Daimler AG v. Bauman, 134 S. Ct. 746 (2014), and Walden v. Fiore, 134 S. Ct. 1115 (2014). Bauman eliminates the traditional “continuous and systematic” contacts test for general jurisdiction, and Walden significantly retracts the ability of courts to exercise personal jurisdiction over out-of-state defendants whose actions have in-state effects. Taken together, both cases will make it significantly more difficult for plaintiffs to exercise control over where lawsuits are filed. In some cases — such as large-scale class actions — the new decisions may make it impossible to identify a single forum where multiple defendants can be sued together, and will therefore shift the balance of litigation power from plaintiffs to defendants.

This Article examines the effect that these decisions will have on future litigation and suggests solutions to the problems that will arise in the wake of these decisions. It analyzes how the Court’s new jurisprudence has shifted the balance of power in the jurisdictional framework, and it explores areas of future litigation. . . .

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U.S. Supreme Court’s “Instruction Manual” on Class Action Litigation.

11 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by Celia C. Elwell, RP in 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Appellate Law, Arbitration, Class Actions, Class Certification, Consumer Contracts, Contract Law, Credit Repair, Employment Law, Litigation, United States Supreme Court

≈ Comments Off on U.S. Supreme Court’s “Instruction Manual” on Class Action Litigation.

Tags

American Express Co. v. Italian Colors Restaurant, Arbitration, AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, Class Action, Class Action Waiver Clauses, Class Certification, Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, Consumer Contracts, Credit Repair Organizations, Daniel P. Shapiro, Federal Arbitration Act, Inc. v. Dukes, Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP, Litigation, Oxford Health Plans LLC v. Sutter, Stolt-Nielsen S.A. v. Animalfeeds International Corp., U.S. Supreme Court, Wal-Mart Stores

Recent Developments For Litigation Risk Mitigation: The U.S. Supreme Court’s Prescription, by Daniel P. Shapiro, Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP  

(This piece is adapted from Daniel P. Shapiro’s article published in the November 2013, issue of AHLA Connections. © 2013 American Health Lawyers Association.)

Read Mr. Shapiro’s analysis of recent U.S. Supreme Court cases that have created an instruction manual of sorts for reducing litigation risks for American businesses, as stated below in the excerpt to his post.

There is a hyperlink at the end of the article that will take you to the original article. -CCE

 http://tinyurl.com/ldd7s2o

Over the past three years, since mid-2010, the Supreme Court has handed down a series of related decisions that, taken together, constitute an instruction manual for American business on how to reduce litigation risk. As the world has ‘flattened’ and trade has increasingly globalized and become borderless, it has been impossible to ignore that only in the U.S. economy is litigation such a prominent line item for business. This is particularly true with regard to class action litigation. No other country has the sort of class—or collective—action rules that the United States does. Perhaps in response to these facts, the Supreme Court has made it clear that through a combination of arbitration (as opposed to litigation) and class action waiver clauses properly used, businesses can contract out from under a great deal of litigation risk for the future and fundamentally change their litigation environment.

The new Supreme Court decisions offer instruction on how, exactly, to use arbitration clauses and class action waivers to mitigate litigation risk.

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How Do Jurors In A Recession Really Feel About The Financial Industry?

09 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by Celia C. Elwell, RP in Class Actions, Corporate Law, Finance and Banking Law, Jury Persuasion, Jury Selection, Litigation, Trial Tips and Techniques, Voir Dire, White Collar Crime

≈ Comments Off on How Do Jurors In A Recession Really Feel About The Financial Industry?

Tags

Banking Industry, Elizabeth Babbitt M.A., Financial Institutions, For The Defense Magazine, High-Interest Loans, Housing Crash, Jill Leibold Ph.D., Juror Bias, Jurors, Litigation Insights, Louis A. Huber III, Mortgage Foreclosure, Recession

Take This To The Bank: Jurors’ Evaluations Of Financial Industry Defendants During A Recession, by Jill Leibold Ph.D., Director, Jury Research, Elizabeth Babbitt, M.A., Consultant, and Louis A. Huber III, of Schlee, Huber, McMullen and Krause, LITIGATION INSIGHTS

http://tinyurl.com/nx84u56

[I]n the following article, published in DRI’s, For the Defense magazine, we wanted to evaluate biases in the way jurors would view banking or finance defendants. Given that almost all of Americans have felt they’ve been affected by the most recent recession, we conducted a study to gauge those positive or negative attitudes toward the financial industry as well as piece together how these issues could shape jurors’ perceptions toward banking and finance defendants come trial. . . .

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The Sixth Circuit Wrestles With When to Pull the Trigger on the Unconscionability Doctrine in Arbitration Clauses.

30 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by Celia C. Elwell, RP in 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, Appellate Law, Arbitration, Class Actions, LexisNexis, Research, Trial Tips and Techniques

≈ Comments Off on The Sixth Circuit Wrestles With When to Pull the Trigger on the Unconscionability Doctrine in Arbitration Clauses.

Tags

Arbitrations, Class Action, ContractsProf Blog, D.A. Jeremy Telman, LexisNexis, Unconscionability Doctrin

Sixth Circuit Affirms District Court, Rejects Attorney’s Bid for Class-Wide Arbitration, by Kprofs2013, edited by D.A. Jeremy Telman, ContractsProf Blog

http://tinyurl.com/p9sryqw

This case started as a disagreement between a law firm and LexisNexis over billing practices. The parties’ disagreement was bound by an arbitration agreement. The law firm decided to bring two class actions over 500 million dollars against LexisNexis. The terms of the arbitration agreement and the lack of any definitive U.S. Supreme Court ruling on whether classwide arbitrability is a “gateway” or “subsidiary” question places the Sixth Circuit in an interesting conundrum.

What follows in this post at ContractsProf Blog is an analysis of the Sixth Court’s opinion, the ambiguous arbitration agreement, and the use, or lack thereof, of the unconscionability doctrine. -CCE 

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EEOC Loses Claim of Unlawful Discrimination Against Employer

24 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by Celia C. Elwell, RP in Class Actions, Criminal History, EEOC, Employment Law, Race Discrimination

≈ Comments Off on EEOC Loses Claim of Unlawful Discrimination Against Employer

Tags

Criminal History, EEOC, Employment Law, Race Discrimination

 EEOC Smacked Down in Rare Employer Win in Defending Claim of Unlawful Discrimination, by Jason Shinn, Michigan Employment Law Advisor
http://bit.ly/17hzWaK

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