Harm

Judge Rules in Favour of ’60s Scoop Victims

“Whether we succeeded or didn’t succeed, the exercise now is for Canadians, all Canadians, to engage in a healing process to examine the harm that was done, not just to First Nations, but to a good number of caring, non-First Nations people who took on the adoption of Indian children or permanent guardianship, and who also were deprived of information that would help them in their care,” the …


Data Breach Harm Standard May Head to SCOTUS in ‘17

Companies facing data breaches grapple with lack of clear harm standard for consumer class actions   Breach harm standing has potential to reach U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 Dec. 5 — Hacking attacks, lax data security and rampant cybercrime create risks for corporations, including consumer lawsuits stemming from large-scale data breaches. Plaintiffs have lined up at courthouse doors for years, …


Spokeo Decision Leads to Dismissal of Lyft Class Action

Though a district judge used a U.S. Supreme Court decision issued last spring to dismiss a Lyft driver’s proposed class action over alleged Fair Credit Reporting Act violations, that high court ruling hasn’t killed all such putative actions, a Tampa, Florida-based attorney says. “I think this was another instance of tension between the Supreme Court, a …


11th Circuit Court of Appeals Rejects Class Action Alleging Violation of Mortgage Satisfaction Recording Laws, Finding Injury-In-Fact Lacking Under Spokeo.

On Oct. 6, 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit decided Nicklaw v. CitiMortgage, Inc ., — F.3d –, 2016 WL 5845682, (11th Cir. 2016), holding that a class action plaintiff who alleged that CitiMortgage violated New York law by failing to timely record a satisfaction of mortgage, lacked Article III standing because he had suffered no concrete injury. Nicklaw is one of the 11th …


How to Defeat the Repeat Consumer Class Action Plaintiff

Airlines have frequent flyer programs, restaurants and coffee shops have customer loyalty programs, and plaintiff’s class action firms have repeat class action plaintiffs. These frequent class plaintiffs are either unlucky or they go looking for trouble. See Beyond Systems, Inc. v. Kraft Foods, Inc., 777 F.3d 712, 714 (2015) (noting that email spam litigation accounted for 90% of plaintiff’s …


Strange Praises SCOTUS Decision Limiting Lawsuits

Attorney General Luther Strange recently hailed a U.S. Supreme Court decision clarifying that persons filing lawsuits must be able to prove actual harm. The ruling serves to place limits on costly class action lawsuits based on technical violations of the law in which persons have suffered no actual damage. On May 16, the Supreme Court ruled 6-2 in favor of the on-line company …


You Can’t Escape Data Surveillance in America

Because the American credit reporting system relies on both good and bad reports of creditworthiness, a consumer must have some kind of credit—not just the absence of bad credit. (In some countries, the lack of a credit report can establish good credit). “The American system, on other hand, relies on total surveillance,” writes Chris Jay Hoofnagle in his primer on privacy law and the Federal …