class certification

The complaint arrives styled as a class action, and the number at the bottom of the page is built to frighten you. A single fee, a single line in a form contract, or a single advertisement, multiplied across every customer you have served for years, until the demand looks large enough to swallow the company. The plaintiff’s lawyer wants you to see that number and reach for the checkbook before anyone asks the harder question. Can this case be a class action at all?

Most consumer fraud class actions are won or lost at class certification, the stage where the court decides whether one named plaintiff may sue on behalf of thousands. Illinois law gives a defendant real tools to defeat certification, and the strongest of them rests on one idea. A consumer fraud claim requires that each plaintiff was actually deceived, and deception rarely reaches thousands of people the same way.

By Peter S. Lubin and James V. DiTommaso

A process server hands your company a class action complaint late on a Friday. By Monday you are reading a theory that turns one disputed
charge or one form document into a claim brought on behalf of thousands of people. The instinct is to wait, to answer the complaint, and to see how bad it gets. That instinct is a mistake. What a defendant does in the first thirty days often decides the case, because the early choices
about where the lawsuit is heard and whether the plaintiff can clear the threshold hurdles shape everything that follows.

This is a plain guide to the opening moves that protect a business sued in a putative class action, from removal to federal court through
the standing defenses that can end the case before a class is ever certified.

Articles Tagged with class certification

Sued in an Illinois Consumer Fraud Class Action? How Defendants Defeat Class Certification

Served With a Class Action in Illinois? The First Moves That Decide the Case