Tag Archives: Class Action

A Different Perspective On Mass Torts.

02 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in Class Actions, Litigation, Torts

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

08 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by in Civil Procedure, Class Actions, Federal Civil Procedure, Jurisdiction, Litigation

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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. . . .

Duty to Arbitrate Survives End of Employment Contracts.

05 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by in 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, Arbitration, Arbitration, Collective Bargaining, Employment Contracts, Employment Law, Fair Labor Standards Act, United States Supreme Court

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Sixth Circuit Holds That Duty To Arbitrate Survives Expiration Of Employment Contract, Requires Individual Arbitration, by Gregory V. Mersol, Baker & Hostetler

http://tinyurl.com/q7yg9s5

With the Supreme Court having issued a series of decisions overruling many of the roadblocks to the enforcement of arbitration agreements in the class context, we are now seeing more courts fill in the gaps as to whether and when employers may rely on such agreements.

The latest of these is the case of Huffman v. The Hilltop Companies, LLC, Case No. 13-3938 (6th Cir. Mar. 27, 2014), which concerned the question of whether the duty to arbitrate and limits to class arbitration extend beyond termination.  In one respect, the decision was obvious, but in another, it represents the growing, if at time reluctant, acceptance by courts of the enforceability of arbitration agreements. . . .

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

11 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by 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

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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.

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

30 Saturday Nov 2013

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

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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