Analysis

High Court's Cisco Ruling Is A Win For Multinational Cos.

By Y. Peter Kang

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision Tuesday clearing Cisco in an Alien Tort Statute suit alleging it helped the Chinese government violate international law is a win for companies that do business in regions with possible human rights issues, experts tell Law360.

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Justices Say Cisco Can't Be Sued Under Alien Tort Statute

By Y. Peter Kang

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that the Ninth Circuit was wrong to reinstate an Alien Tort Statute suit alleging that Cisco helped the Chinese government's allegedly unlawful crackdown on the Falun Gong religious movement, saying federal courts lack authority to create causes of action for alleged violations of international law.

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9th Circ. Judge Pans Live Nation's 'Unlawful' Arbitration Terms

By Dorothy Atkins

A Ninth Circuit panel on Tuesday expressed doubt about Live Nation's argument that a putative class action seeking refunds for a canceled 2022 festival belongs in arbitration, with one judge calling Live Nation's arguments "puzzling" and another judge saying she's disturbed to see a "blatantly unlawful provision" in its terms.

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ADP Strikes Deal In Sweeping 401(k) Class Action

By Patrick Hoff

Payroll processing company ADP has agreed to settle a 50,000-member class action alleging it kept expensive, underperforming investment options in its 401(k) plan and funneled millions of dollars from employees' retirement savings to a subsidiary, according to a filing in New Jersey federal court.

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UnitedHealth Trims But Can't Escape 401(k) Forfeiture Suit

By Kellie Mejdrich

UnitedHealth Group won dismissal of some claims in a proposed class action alleging the company mismanaged its employee 401(k) and profit sharing plan by misallocating forfeitures, but couldn't escape allegations that the way the company spent the funds breached fiduciary duties and caused transactions prohibited by federal benefits law.

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Colo. Judge Says Mine Operator's FLSA Suit Can Proceed

By Rachel Konieczny

A Colorado federal judge declined to toss a proposed collective action that alleged a Colorado coal mining company failed to pay its hourly employees for overtime worked, ruling Tuesday that a mine operator alleged sufficient facts for the lawsuit to survive.

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9th Circ. Allows Airport Cleaning Co. To Arbitrate Wage Claims

By Lauren Berg

A company that offers janitorial services to airports can compel arbitration in a former employee's wage and hour proposed class action, the Ninth Circuit ruled Tuesday, reversing a California district court's determination that the arbitration agreement was unconscionable.

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Worker Accuses Outsourcing Co. Of Pay Errors

By MJ Koo

A former customer support worker has sued a business process outsourcing company in Massachusetts federal court, alleging the company shortchanged workers on overtime and paid them late because of its semimonthly pay system.

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Class Certified In Konica Minolta Workers' Severance Dispute

By George Woolston

A New Jersey federal judge Tuesday agreed to certify a class of workers alleging Konica Minolta used an office relocation as a guise to conduct a mass layoff without having to pay severance.

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Chancery OKs $29.5M Settlement In Chewy Shareholder Suit

By Jarek Rutz

Delaware's Chancery Court on Tuesday approved a $29.5 million settlement ending a derivative suit that accused a private equity firm of structuring a transaction that benefited it at Chewy Inc.'s expense, noting an independent special litigation committee had uncovered potentially valuable claims and determined a settlement was the better path forward.

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Hertz Investor Class Certified After $10M EV Demand Suit Deal

By Elaine Briseño

A Florida federal judge certified a class of Hertz investors following a $10 million deal to resolve claims that the rental company overstated consumer demand for its electric vehicles and later tried to offload the cars amid a $200 million earnings hit.

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Brief

Cancer Drug Co. Investors Get First OK On $7M Deal

By Sydney Price

A New York federal judge preliminarily approved a $7 million deal resolving class action claims alleging Spectrum Pharmaceuticals Inc. overstated its regulatory prospects for winning approval for a cancer treatment.

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Stock Bought Too Late For Breakup Fee Suit, Judge Says

By Katryna Perera

A New York federal judge has dismissed an investor suit claiming that the top brass of the sponsor of a blank check company unfairly claimed a $29 million settlement despite missing a deadline to merge with another company, finding that the investor purchased shares after the breakup fee of the failed merger was disclosed.

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Investors Say Franklin's Putnam Unit Overvalued Funds

By Julie Manganis

Franklin Templeton's Putnam Funds failed to disclose accounting practices that led to inflated net asset value calculations and saddled investors with higher costs, according to a proposed $100 million class action filed in Massachusetts state court.

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Voyager Investors Appeal Toss Of Mark Cuban Crypto Case

By Katryna Perera

Investors of collapsed cryptocurrency brokerage Voyager Digital on Tuesday told a Florida federal judge they are challenging his order dismissing their claims against Mark Cuban and the Dallas Mavericks and his ruling denying the transfer of the case to Texas.

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Claritev Says It Wasn't Target Of Criminal Antitrust Probe

By Matthew Perlman

Healthcare data firm Claritev said the U.S. Department of Justice is ending a grand jury investigation of potential antitrust violations in the health insurance space and is not targeting the company with a criminal probe.

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Brief

FTC Tells 4th Circ. Court Got It Wrong In J&J Stelara Case

By Nadia Dreid

The Federal Trade Commission has told the Fourth Circuit that a Virginia federal court messed up when it ruled in an antitrust suit against Johnson & Johnson that the company bringing the suit needed to show specific intent in order to prop up a monopolization claim over the immunosuppressive drug Stelara.

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Quinnipiac Treated Rugby As 'Less Of A Sport,' Judge Told

By Aaron Keller

Quinnipiac University women's rugby athletes and new recruits urged a Connecticut federal judge Tuesday to force the Division I school to maintain the team's varsity status while a Title IX discrimination lawsuit unfolds, arguing the school unfairly targeted the program during budget cuts despite clinching three national titles.

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DC Judge Pulls Plug On Feds' Voter Citizenship Database

By Tom Lotshaw

A D.C. federal judge blocked the Trump administration's expansion of a database that allows states to screen voters, saying it "haphazardly combined and repurposed" information on millions of Americans, including unreliable citizenship information, and violated multiple laws.

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Google And Adult Website Defeat Data Sharing Suit, For Now

By Lauren Berg

A California federal judge on Tuesday again tossed a proposed class action alleging that an adult website illegally shares customers' private sexual information with third parties like Google, noting that the amended complaint made "perplexing" changes that don't fix the original suit's issues, but allowed the plaintiff to rework some allegations.

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Paramount Urges High Court To Limit Video Privacy Lawsuits

By Allison Grande

Paramount Global is calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to preserve a ruling that only consumers who directly subscribe to audiovisual goods and services can bring lawsuits under the Video Privacy Protection Act, arguing that a more expansive reading would allow plaintiffs to flood the courts and would wrongly "transform" the law into an "unworkable internet-privacy regime."

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Stryker Says Data Breach Suit Built On Speculation

By Melanie Dorsey

Michigan-based medical technology company Stryker Corp. has asked a federal judge to toss a proposed class action over a March cyberattack, arguing the former and current employees suing the company cannot show their personal information was accessed or that they suffered any injury tied to the incident.

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Planned Parenthood Sent Patient Data To Google, Suit Says

By Danielle Ferguson

Planned Parenthood and regional affiliates were hit with a proposed class action alleging they use hidden tracking tools on their website and patient portals to transmit sensitive sexual and reproductive health information to third-party companies such as Google and Meta without consent. 

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Circle Says It's Not Liable To Crypto Users For Drift Hack

By Sydney Price

Circle Internet Group urged a Massachusetts federal court to toss a suit from crypto users accusing the stablecoin issuer of failing to act when $280 million in digital assets was drained from crypto project Drift Protocol in an April Fools' Day exploit, arguing that accusations of inaction are insufficient to support the claims.

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Chicken Buyers Say Costco Can't Ditch False Ad Suit

By Mike Curley

A proposed class of consumers is urging a California federal court not to throw out their claims that Costco Wholesale Corp. falsely advertised its rotisserie chickens as having no preservatives, saying consumer expectation, not federal regulations, is what matters in the case.

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Cintas Faces Class Action Over Unwanted Sales Calls

By Ben Adlin

A Tennessee man brought a proposed nationwide class action against Cintas Corp. on Monday, accusing the Ohio-based workforce apparel and training company of unlawfully barraging phone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry with telemarketing calls for CPR and first aid training.

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Meta Fights Authors' Bid For Quick Appeal In AI Training Case

By Elliot Weld

Meta Platforms Inc. urged a California federal judge on Monday to reject a bid by 13 authors to appeal his ruling that the company's use of their copyrighted works to train its Llama large language models was fair use, arguing the decision was not a novel legal question warranting appellate review.

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Nvidia Seeks To Toss 3D Artist's 'Copycat' Copyright AI Suit

By Bonnie Eslinger

Nvidia Corp. urged a California federal court to throw out a Los Angeles-based 3D artist's proposed class action claiming violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, saying the way Nvidia's artificial intelligence models are trained and used puts the company outside the scope of the federal copyright law.

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Truist Division Sued Over Citizenship-Based Loan Denial

By Sydney Price

A recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals hit Truist Financial Corp. division Sheffield Financial and an Oklahoma motorcycle dealership with a proposed class action alleging he was wrongfully denied credit based on his immigration status despite having an above-average credit score.

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Calif. Judge Restores Immigration Courthouse Arrest Limits

By Hailey Konnath

A California federal judge Tuesday vacated the Trump administration's policies on civil arrests at immigration courthouses, restoring limits on those arrests and finding that the government didn't adequately explain its policy shift.

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Drawing A Line Between Settlement Pressure And Extortion

U.S. v. Luo, pending in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, may force courts to address anew when settlement negotiations become criminal extortion, particularly in the age of easily fabricated digital evidence, says attorney Denis Kiely.

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How 3 Courts Are Approaching AI Adoption

By Emily Sawicki

The rules surrounding artificial intelligence experimentation in courts run the gamut from court systems offering proprietary tools and training to unwritten policies that essentially amount to don't ask, don't tell.

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Analysis

With Data And AI, Whistleblowers Set Off An FCA Tidal Wave

By Phillip Bantz

Whistleblowers are increasingly using artificial intelligence to comb through public data in search of potential False Claims Act cases, unleashing a flood of new complaints that are shaking up white collar defense and government enforcement efforts while subjecting more companies to potentially false allegations, experts say.

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Conn. Justices Threaten Sanctions For AI Errors

By Andrea Keckley

The Connecticut Supreme Court has threatened to sanction GLG Law LLC and one of its attorneys for submitting documents in two cases "that misrepresented the law through the use of generative artificial intelligence," according to a Tuesday order that summoned them to appear in court next month.

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Atty DQ Over Inadvertent Doc Disclosure Overturned

By Y. Peter Kang

A California state appeals court has upended the disqualification of defense counsel in a sexual battery suit, saying documents undermining the case that were accidentally produced via a Dropbox link were not privileged.

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DOJ Nominee Questioned About Deleted Social Media Posts

By Courtney Bublé

A nominee for a top U.S. Department of Justice position, who is a real estate attorney turned tech entrepreneur, came under fire on Wednesday for past social media posts that he's now deleted.

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Booker, Cassidy Press DOJ On Trump Immunity Deal

By Courtney Bublé

Sens. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., wrote to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on Wednesday expressing "serious concerns" about the alleged immunity for President Donald Trump, his family and businesses in the controversial settlement he reached with the IRS.

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