Class Actions

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Class action defense built around defeating certification, protecting companies in consumer, securities, employment, and privacy class actions where the difference between one plaintiff and a nationwide class can decide your exposure.

A class action turns a single complaint into bet-the-company litigation, bundling thousands of claims and the threat of staggering damages into one case. We defend businesses facing consumer, securities, employment, and data privacy class actions, focusing relentlessly on the moment that usually decides everything: whether a court will certify the class at all.

Defeating Class Certification

Certification is where most class actions are won or lost, so it is where we concentrate. We attack the Rule 23 requirements directly, showing why individual issues swamp common ones, why the named plaintiff is not typical or adequate, and why a class trial would be unmanageable. By developing the factual record early, we put the certification fight on your terms instead of waiting to defend a class that has already been blessed.

Privacy And Technology Classes

Privacy class actions under statutes like BIPA, the VPPA, and state wiretap and data-breach laws turn on how tracking pixels, biometric systems, and data pipelines actually function. Our engineering background lets us dig into the technology rather than take the plaintiffs' description at face value, surfacing the individualized consent, configuration, and exposure questions that undercut the claim that everyone was harmed the same way.

Early Dispositive Motions

The best class action is the one that ends before certification. We push hard at the pleading stage on standing, statutory interpretation, and the elements of each claim, looking for the threshold defect that resolves the case or shrinks it dramatically. When a motion to dismiss can knock out a theory or a putative class definition, we use it to reset the dispute before discovery costs balloon.

Frequently asked questions

The plaintiffs have to clear Rule 23(a), which requires numerosity (enough class members), commonality, typicality, and adequate representation, and then fit into a Rule 23(b) category. For a damages class, that usually means showing common issues predominate over individual ones and that a class action is the superior way to handle the dispute. Certification is the gate the whole case runs through.

The core strategy is showing that individual issues swamp the common ones, so the case can't fairly be tried as a class. You can also attack whether the named plaintiff is really typical of and adequate for the class, argue the class can't be reliably identified, take apart the methodology behind the plaintiffs' common proof, and show that damages would vary too much from member to member. Win these points and the case shrinks back to a single plaintiff.

Certification bundles many small claims into one, which sharply raises the stakes and the settlement value. A claim worth very little per person can become enormous once it covers a whole class, so the potential exposure jumps. That's exactly why certification is so often the decisive fight, and why defense efforts concentrate there rather than on the merits of any single claim.

You can challenge certification, remove the case to federal court under CAFA, and enforce any individual arbitration agreements that keep class members out of court. You can also press early dispositive motions and, of course, defend on the merits. Used together, these tools can narrow the class or eliminate the class exposure altogether.

The Class Action Fairness Act gives federal courts jurisdiction over class actions where there's minimal diversity between the parties and the claims add up to more than $5 million. It made it much easier for defendants to move class actions out of state court and into federal court, which is generally seen as a more favorable forum for defending these cases.

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