Articles Posted in Class-Action

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As Earth’s population continues to increase, sometimes it seems like our world is getting smaller as technological advances manage to give the appearance that people thousands of miles away are right in front of you. Shortly after the birth of the Internet, single people started using it to find other single people with similar interests. Numerous sites have been created that match people up based on geography, interests, and various preferences expressed by each member.

One such popular dating site, called It’s Just Lunch International Inc., encourages single people to meet other single people in their area for lunch, but users of the site sued the company for allegedly ignoring their dating preferences when matching people up with other singles.

The lawsuit was filed by nine plaintiffs in 2007 who combined their claims and sought to represent a total of more than 250 singles. They alleged the dating service overcharged its customers for matchmaking services that claimed to be personalized, while simultaneously ignoring preferences clearly stated by the user, including age and criminal background. Instead, the lawsuit alleged the matches made by the dating site were motivated by monthly quota requirements, even when those requirements allegedly disregarded aspects of a partner plaintiffs had clearly requested. Continue reading ›

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A class action lawsuit is a lawsuit in which many plaintiffs with small claims combine their claims to file one large lawsuit against a defendant. The class action is a legal tool that is extremely beneficial for plaintiffs with small claims who have been cheated out of money or goods as a result of a company’s illegal practices.

The costs of filing a lawsuit are often too high to make it worthwhile for a plaintiff to file a claim for a few hundred, or even a few thousand dollars. Nevertheless, that amount can be significant to plaintiffs, and by cheating many people out of small sums of money, companies can illegally gain a huge profit. The opportunity to file a class action lawsuit gives plaintiffs the chance to pursue their claims and to prevent the defendant from similarly taking advantage of people in the same manner in the future.

But plaintiffs have to fit certain requirements in order for a court judge to grant class certification. The first requirement is numerosity, which means the class must be large enough to warrant pursuing the lawsuit as a class action. There is no specified number of plaintiffs that must be eligible to join a class in order to justify class certification, but in general, classes of less than 20 are not usually found sufficiently large to fulfill the numerosity requirement, while classes of 40 or more stand a pretty good chance of receiving class certification, provided the other requirements are met. Continue reading ›

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Kroger Co. is the largest operator of traditional supermarkets in the United States. It employs more than 422,000 workers and operates about 2,775 stores in 35 states across the country, plus the District of Columbia. The more employees a company manages the more careful it has to be to make sure it’s abiding by all the relevant labor laws.

In the United States the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) protects all employees working throughout the country. It provides a federal minimum wage, defines overtime as any time spent working after eight hours a day or forty hours a week, and requires a premium overtime compensation of one and one-half times the employee’s normal hourly rate for all overtime worked. The FLSA does allow for certain exceptions to the overtime law, but it is very specific about the types of workers that can qualify for the overtime exemption.

Under the FLSA, an employee can be considered exempt from overtime if she fits into either the administrative, executive, or professional category. Rather than simply allowing employers to label their workers as they see fit, the FLSA provides specific qualifications employees must meet in order to be legally considered exempt from overtime. Continue reading ›

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The drastic advances in technology that have happened in recent years make many aspects of modern living much easier, but they have also put certain aspects of our lives at risk that were never at risk before. For example, as people use cash less and less and increasingly rely on their credit cards to pay for their everyday purchases, more and more people have had their credit cards compromised and used to pay for purchases they never authorized. It is now common for credit card companies to offer credit card protection, in which users won’t be made to pay for purchases they did not authorize, but credit card companies usually charge an extra fee for that protection.

Data security is doing its best to keep up with the hackers, but that’s not always possible. Many companies, especially large chains, have suffered data breaches in which hackers illegally gain access to customers’ credit card information. Since it is often very difficult, if not impossible, to locate and prosecute the hackers themselves, the company that suffered the data breach is often faced with a class action lawsuit from customers who had their credit card information exposed as a result of the company’s failure to have the proper protections in place. Continue reading ›

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The federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) protects all employees working throughout the United States. It guarantees things like a minimum wage (which is currently set at $7.25 per hour) access to social security, and premium compensation for all overtime worked. The FLSA also defines overtime as all overtime spent working after eight hours a day or forty hours a week.

The FLSA does allow certain workers to be held exempt from these protections, but it is very specific about the qualifications workers must meet in order to be held exempt. The Act provides employees with these protections because employers generally have much more leverage than their workers, especially workers earning minimum wage. The Act therefore withholds these protections only from employees that have sufficient leverage to negotiate their own terms of work. These employees include salaried administrative assistants, executive employees, professional employees, and independent contractors. Continue reading ›

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Gift cards can be a big money maker for some businesses. They rely on some the gift cards going unused until they expire, in which case the company gets to keep the money spent on the gift card without having to cough up the product or service it was meant to pay for. Sometimes these gift cards go unused as a result of customers receiving them for things they don’t want, they forget about them, or they are simply too busy to use them before the expiration date, but sometimes the company influences the outcome to significantly decrease the likelihood that gift cards will be used before they expire.

According to a recent class action lawsuit against SoulCycle, the fitness chain allegedly issued class passes that expired in an unreasonably short amount of time. The consumer class action lawsuit was filed in August 2015 by the lead plaintiff, Rachel C., who alleges she was unable to use her single-class pass before it expired. Continue reading ›

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When a group of plaintiffs file a class action lawsuit, the class needs to be defined. If the judge is not comfortable with the parameters of the class as laid out by the plaintiffs, the judge can deny class certification until the plaintiffs come back with parameters the judge agrees with.

In the case of the class action lawsuit against Uber, the judge eliminated two groups of drivers from the class: those who were hired for Uber through a limo service and those who signed up to drive for Uber using corporate or fictitious names. The judge deemed the claims of these drivers to be too different from the claims of the drivers who signed up as drivers for Uber under their own names to justify allowing them to join the class. Part of the judge’s reasoning for this was that Uber was not technically the employer of these drivers – the third party Uber used to hire the drivers was the legal employer of these drivers. Continue reading ›

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Erin Brockovich wasn’t the only one to take on a big company that had harmed thousands of people with poisoned water. Rob Bilott took on DuPont for dumping PFOAs into a local creek, when it knew the chemical had adverse health effects, but Bilott’s background was very different from Brockovich’s.

Bilott spent eight years defending large corporations from allegations of violating environmental protection laws. He ended up on the plaintiff’s side by accident.

Some neighbors of Bilott’s grandmother had referred him to a local farmer whose cattle were getting sick and dying. The farmer had linked it to a landfill next to his property owned by DuPont. The company was dumping perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) into the creek that ran through the landfill and the farmer’s land. Because the landfill was upstream from the farm, the cows were drinking poisoned water. Not only did this destroy the farmer’s livelihood, but it was inhumane because the cattle were clearly suffering. Continue reading ›

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When a plaintiff files a class action lawsuit (usually against a large corporation), she does not have to include a list of every single potential class member along with her complaint. In many class action lawsuits, the plaintiffs are easily identifiable, but not always and it’s the cases in which the class members are harder to identify that defendants have been attacking the plaintiffs.

Consumer class actions are usually pretty straightforward and easy to manage. If a product is defective or doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, most retailers can track the consumers who purchased that particular product and notify them of the class action lawsuit.

The process becomes significantly more difficult when the product in question is a small, inexpensive item. Consumers are less likely to keep their receipts of those purchases and the companies making the product often claim that they don’t have a direct list of customers because they sell through various retailers. They can always alert the public to these class action lawsuits and ask anyone who thinks they may fit the criteria for participating in the class to file a claim, but that’s according to corporate defendants who want to defeat class not always reliable. Defendants have been arguing that these types of class action lawsuits should be dismissed unless the plaintiffs prove they have a reliable method of identifying class members and always find holes in any reasonably reliable plan suggested. Continue reading ›

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Anyone who has shopped at Costco has seen people spread throughout the store, particularly in the food aisles, giving out samples and demonstrating how appliances work. Although they are a very familiar sight in the giant discount retailer, Costco Wholesale Corp. does not employee these people. Instead, they are supplied by Club Demonstration Services Inc. and Warehouse Demo Services Inc. (the two companies recently merged under the name Club Demonstration Services Inc.).

Selene P. and Cindy C. filed a class action wage and hour lawsuit against their employers for allegedly violating California wage and hour laws. Continue reading ›

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