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Consumer Protection
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July 12, 2024
FINRA's Remote Inspection Pilot Met With Praise, Caution
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority's new pilot program for remote inspections of broker-dealers has earned praise from attorneys, who say the measures accommodate the reality of remote work routines, but they're waiting to see how the chips fall on questions including the adequacy of the regulator's data security measures.
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July 12, 2024
Biggest Washington Decisions Of 2024: A Midyear Report
The first half of 2024 in Washington courts was punctuated by a fizzled startup's $72 million trial win against The Boeing Co., and Monsanto Co.'s appellate reversal of a $185 million verdict in one of a series of high-profile PCB poisoning cases. Here is a closer look at some of the biggest decisions in Washington state and federal courts in the first half of 2024.
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July 12, 2024
Altice Says Conn. AG's 'Enhancement Fee' Suit Needs Details
Altice USA is asking for a more specific complaint in the state of Connecticut's illegal-fee lawsuit against the cable company, telling a state judge that the initial nine-page complaint is too vague to understand or respond to.
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July 12, 2024
AT&T Reveals Breach Of 'Nearly All' Users' Wireless Records
AT&T disclosed Friday that hackers had downloaded phone call and text message records belonging to "nearly all" the telecom giant's wireless customers at various times between May 2022 and early last year, although the company stressed that the breached data did not include the contents of these communications or appear to be publicly available.
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July 12, 2024
FTC Says Abandoned Novant Deal Moots Lower Court Loss
The Federal Trade Commission is looking to unravel a North Carolina federal judge's order allowing Novant's planned $320 million hospital merger to advance after it subsequently abandoned the deal, telling the Fourth Circuit the appeal is moot and the order should be vacated.
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July 12, 2024
Former City Treasurer Gets 30 Months In $1M Embezzlement
A former city treasurer in Alaska was sentenced to two and a half years in prison after having admitted to tax evasion and fraud in connection with a $1 million embezzlement scheme, according to Alaska federal court documents.
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July 12, 2024
Apple, Amazon Fight Over Class Terms In £500M Price Claim
A consumer advocate clashed in a London tribunal on Friday with Apple and Amazon over the terms of her £500 million ($649 million) class action that accuses them of inking a secret deal to limit independent sales of Apple's products.
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July 12, 2024
DraftKings' Voided NBA Bets Spark Lawsuit In Fed. Court
An Indiana man claiming he was cheated out of a $150,000 payday has sued DraftKings over its decision to void bets on an October NBA game, with the online betting giant moving the proposed class action to federal court this week.
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July 12, 2024
Ex-Magellan Execs Waive Conflicts Over Past Shared Counsel
Two former Magellan Diagnostics executives charged with conspiring to hide defects in the company's lead testing devices agreed on Friday to waive any potential conflict created by their prior joint representation by a Donnelly Conroy & Gelhaar LLP attorney.
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July 11, 2024
Sens. Say AI Fuels Need For Data Privacy Law But Fail To Act
Members of a key U.S. Senate committee Thursday largely agreed that companies' growing efforts to amass private information to fuel artificial intelligence technologies are accelerating the need for a federal data privacy framework, but they failed to make progress on a bipartisan proposal opposed by the committee's top Republican.
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July 11, 2024
Sens. Pitch COPIED Act To Fight AI-Content, Empower Artists
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced legislation dubbed the COPIED Act on Thursday to fight the growth of AI-generated "deepfakes," proposing a framework that would give journalists and artists control over their work via a watermarking process and allow them to sue those who use their work without permission.
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July 11, 2024
TikTok's Bid For Users' Device Data Found Overbroad
A California federal magistrate judge overseeing discovery in multidistrict litigation over claims that social media is addictive denied TikTok's request Thursday for "full" forensic images of all personal devices bellwether plaintiffs used to access its platform, telling defense counsel that he's concerned about the "overbreadth" of the request and privacy issues.
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July 11, 2024
Tempur Sealy, Mattress Firm Blast FTC's Merger Challenge
Tempur Sealy and Mattress Firm fired back at the Federal Trade Commission's bid to block a proposed merger between the mattress companies, contending in separate filings that the FTC's ambiguous allegations require tossing the agency's administrative complaint.
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July 11, 2024
Kroger Asks To Delay At Least Part Of FTC Challenge
Kroger and Albertsons are asking an administrative law judge from the Federal Trade Commission to pause the evidentiary portion of the agency's in-house case against the supermarket giants' merger, saying the companies are facing too many overlapping cases in different venues to adequately prepare and present their case.
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July 11, 2024
Disney Beats Suit Over Post-Pandemic Park Pass Restrictions
A Florida federal judge Thursday tossed a lawsuit accusing Disney World of cheating customers who held pricey "Platinum" passes for its Sunshine State parks by imposing new restrictions on their use after the pandemic hit, saying the two women who sued could have canceled their passes and received a refund.
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July 11, 2024
Apple Ducks iPhone Web App Antitrust Suit, For Now
Consumers will have to rejigger their proposed antitrust class action alleging Apple anticompetitively prevents iPhones from running web-based apps that don't need to be downloaded, after a California federal judge said Thursday that they've failed to show a conspiracy or connect the dots from company rules to customer injury.
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July 11, 2024
Customers Want Domino's Kept In BIPA Voiceprint Suit
Domino's Pizza customers told an Illinois federal judge Wednesday that the chain's corporate parent should face their lawsuit over the state's biometric privacy law, saying Domino's can't shield itself given the "unusually high degree of control" it has over the subsidiaries that ultimately own the restaurants they ordered from.
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July 11, 2024
7th Circ. Revives CFPB's Lender Redlining Suit
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should be allowed to pursue claims that a mortgage lender illegally disparaged majority-Black neighborhoods, the Seventh Circuit said Thursday, finding the agency was empowered to enforce violations against prospective borrowers.
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July 11, 2024
Attys Say Milberg Must Pay For Fraud In Visa, Mastercard MDL
Class counsel representing plaintiffs in long-running multidistrict litigation accusing Visa and Mastercard of charging improper merchant fees have called for sanctions against Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman LLC, laying out arguments for a fee reimbursement after the firm admitted to mistakenly registering fraudulent clients.
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July 11, 2024
Calif. Nabs $50M Deal With Oil Traders In Gas Price-Rigging Suit
California secured a $50 million settlement with oil trading companies Vitol and SK Energy, resolving allegations that the companies schemed to artificially inflate gas prices in the Golden State after an Exxon Mobil Corp. refinery exploded in 2015, California's attorney general announced Wednesday.
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July 11, 2024
Legal Foundation Urges Justices To Limit RICO's Civil Scope
The Washington Legal Foundation on Thursday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a Second Circuit decision allowing a trucker to sue three CBD companies under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, saying the circuit court ignored RICO's structure and purpose.
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July 11, 2024
FERC 'Waiting For Me To Die' With Late Order, Utility Atty Says
Counsel for the Louisiana Public Service Commission told the Fifth Circuit on Thursday the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is "waiting for me to die" as it delays issuing a compliance order to System Energy Resources Inc., saying the agency was doing irreparable harm to consumers.
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July 11, 2024
Oil Giants Defeat City Of Baltimore's Climate Change Claims
A Maryland judge has dismissed Baltimore's suit seeking climate change-related damages from oil companies including Chevron, Exxon and BP, ruling that the city's claims stem from a global phenomenon and thus are "beyond the limits of Maryland state law."
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July 11, 2024
Premium Baby Bottles Leach Microplastics, Suit Says
A proposed class action filed against Newell Brands Inc. this week alleges that the company's Nuk brand of baby bottles, advertised as BPA-free, are, in fact, prone to leaching millions of particles of microplastics through routine use.
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July 11, 2024
Feds Seek Input On 37 GHz Sharing Plans
Federal regulators intend to ask for the public's input in August about a possible revamp of the lower 37 gigahertz airwaves, the U.S. Department of Commerce said.
Expert Analysis
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What 3rd Circ. Trust Ruling Means For Securitization Market
Mercedes Tunstall and Michael Gambro at Cadwalader break down the Third Circuit's March decision in Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. National Collegiate Master Student Loan Trust, as well as predict next steps in the litigation and the implications of the decision for servicers and the securitization industry as a whole.
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Using Rule 23(f) To Review Class Certification Orders
Since plaintiffs on average are prevailing in certifying a class more often than not, the best-positioned class action defendants are those prepared to pursue relief under Rule 23(f) well before the district court issues its certification decision, say attorneys at K&L Gates.
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Binance Ruling Spotlights Muddled Post-Morrison Landscape
The Second Circuit's recent decision in Williams v. Binance highlights the judiciary's struggle to apply the U.S. Supreme Court's Morrison v. National Australia Bank ruling to digital assets, and illustrates how Morrison's territorial limits on the federal securities laws have become convoluted, say Andrew Rhys Davies and Jessica Lewis at WilmerHale.
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Data Protection Steps To Consider After Biden Privacy Order
A recent White House executive order casts a spotlight on the criticality of securing sensitive content communications, presenting challenges and necessitating a recalibration of practices, especially for lawyers, says Camilo Artiga-Purcell at Kiteworks.
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Highlights From The 2024 ABA Antitrust Spring Meeting
U.S. merger enforcement and cartels figured heavily in this year's American Bar Association spring antitrust meeting, where one key takeaway included news that the Federal Trade Commission's anticipated changes to the Hart-Scott-Rodino form may be less dramatic than many originally feared, say attorneys at Freshfields.
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The Future Of BIPA Insurance Litigation After Visual Pak
A recent Illinois appellate court decision, National Fire Insurance v. Visual Pak, may have altered the future of insurance litigation under the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act by diametrically opposing a prominent Seventh Circuit ruling that found insurance coverage for violations of the act, say attorneys at Jenner & Block.
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Consumer Privacy Takeaways From FTC Extraterritorial Action
With what appears to be its first privacy-related consent agreement with a non-U.S. business, the Federal Trade Commission establishes that its reach is extraterritorial and that consumer internet browsing data is sensitive data, and there are lessons for any multinational business that handles consumer information, say Olivia Greer and Alexis Bello at Weil.
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NC Rulings Show Bankruptcy Isn't Only For Insolvent Debtors
Two recent rulings from a North Carolina bankruptcy court show that lack of financial distress is not a requirement for bankruptcy protection, particularly in the Fourth Circuit, but these types of cases can still be dismissed for other reasons, say Stuart Gordon and Alexandria Vath at Rivkin Radler.
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Series
Whitewater Kayaking Makes Me A Better Lawyer
Whether it's seeing clients and their issues from a new perspective, or staying nimble in a moment of intense challenge, the lessons learned from whitewater kayaking transcend the rapids of a river and prepare attorneys for the courtroom and beyond, says Matthew Kent at Alston & Bird.
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Navigating Kentucky's New Consumer Privacy Law
On April 4, Kentucky passed a new law that imposes obligations on affected businesses relating to the collection, use and sale of personal data — and those operating within the state must prepare for a new regulatory landscape governing the handling of consumer data, say Risa Boerner and Martha Vázquez at Fisher Phillips.
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This Earth Day, Consider How Your Firm Can Go Greener
As Earth Day approaches, law firms and attorneys should consider adopting more sustainable practices to reduce their carbon footprint — from minimizing single-use plastics to purchasing carbon offsets for air travel — which ultimately can also reduce costs for clients, say M’Lynn Phillips and Lisa Walters at IMS Legal Strategies.
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New Proposal Signals Sharper Enforcement Focus At CFIUS
Last week's proposed rule aimed at broadening the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States' enforcement authority over foreign investments and increasing penalties for violations signals that CFIUS intends to continue expanding its aggressive monitoring of national security issues, say attorneys at Kirkland.
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What FinCEN Proposed Customer ID Number Change Means
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network's recent request for comment on changing a requirement for banks to collect full Social Security numbers at account sign-up represents an important opportunity for banks to express their preferability, as communicating sensitive information online may carry fraud or cybersecurity risks, say attorneys at Crowell & Moring.
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Circumstantial Evidence Requires A Pointillist Approach
Because complex cases with sophisticated defendants are unlikely to reveal much, if any, direct evidence, attorneys must aggregate many pieces of circumstantial evidence into a cohesive narrative — much like the painting technique of pointillism, says Reuben Guttman at Guttman Buschner.
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Questions Persist After Ruling Skirts $925M TCPA Award Issue
After an Oregon federal court's recent Wakefield v. ViSalus ruling that the doctrine of constitutional avoidance precluded it from deciding whether a $925 million Telephone Consumer Protection Act damages award was constitutionally sound, further guidance is needed on when statutory damages violate due process, says Michael Klotz at O'Melveny.