Articles Tagged with Chicago class action lawyers near Oak Brook and Hinsdale

With the invention of cell phones and prepaid plans, people suddenly found themselves getting charged for promotional calls and texts made by various companies. Cold calling was a standard sales technique for most companies for decades, and while some consumers may have found them obnoxious, they were never actively harmful.

That remained true so long as the companies were the ones paying for the calls that they made. When the phone bills were switched to the consumers, people started to complain. Legislators responded by creating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) which prohibits companies from calling or texting consumers, without the prior consent of those consumers, except in emergency situations. Since there are very few, if any, emergency situations which would warrant a company contacting its customers immediately, this effectively forbids companies from contacting their customers via phone, without the proper authorization.

With various laws like the TCPA, it can be hard for the average citizen to keep up with them all. Companies have gotten pretty good at keeping track of them, though, as well as avoiding them. Permission for the company to contact the customer, or a waiver of certain rights on the part of the customer, have become standard in all sorts of contracts. It is for this reason that consumers are often warned to read the fine print before they sign anything, though few of them actually do. Continue reading ›

When considering filing a lawsuit against a company or individual, it is advisable to first make sure that you have a strong case. The first things to check are that you are covered under the relevant law and that you have a valid claim for loss of a certain monetary value. It is important to note that deciding not to buy something because the price was too high does not constitute a loss.

Ben Hoch-Parker disagrees. He and Josh Finkelman filed a class action lawsuit against the National Football League for allegedly violating the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act (NJCFA). The lawsuit alleges that the NFL withholds 99% of its Super Bowl tickets from the general public. According to the lawsuit, the NFL gives 75% of the big game tickets to the 32 NFL teams. Five percent goes to the host team, 17.5% to each team that is represented in the Super Bowl, and the remaining 29 teams each get 1.2% of the tickets. Another 25% of the game tickets are then allegedly given to broadcast networks, media sponsors, the host committee, and other insiders.

Once the NFL’s member clubs have their tickets, the NFL allegedly places no restrictions on the sale of those tickets, allowing the NFL franchises to auction off their ticket allotments to the highest bidding ticket broker. The lawsuit alleges that, “The broker then sells the tickets for exorbitant amounts on the secondary market.”

The lawsuit is filing a claim for this allegedly illegal practice because the NJCFA states that at least 95% of tickets must be sold to the general public. Instead, the lawsuit alleges, every year, the NFL prints “tens of thousands of Super Bowl tickets, yet it only allocates a meager one percent of these tickets for release to the general public through a lottery system, forcing all other fans into a secondary market for the tickets where they must pay substantially more than the ticket’s face value to attend one of the most popular and iconic sports events of the year.” Continue reading ›

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