A hotly contested ruling in a Fair Credit Reporting Act class action case will soon be appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States.  The Ninth Circuit in Ramirez v. TransUnion LLC, Case No. 17-17244, recently granted the parties’ Joint Motion to Stay the Mandate, seeking to stay the Ninth Circuit’s mandate pending TransUnion’s filing of a petition for writ of certiorari in the Supreme Court.  The Motion to Stay comes soon after the court denied TransUnion’s Petition for Rehearing or Rehearing En Banc regarding the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Ramirez v. TransUnion LLC, 951 F.3d 1008 (9th Cir. 2020).
Continue Reading TransUnion to Seek Supreme Court Review After Ninth Circuit Finds Class Members Had Standing and Partially Upholds Punitive Damages Award

For the first time in the Ninth Circuit, the Court of Appeals addressed the issue of whether every class member in a class action lawsuit needs “standing” to recover damages at the final judgment stage, and found in the affirmative.  In Ramirez v. TransUnion LLC, No. 17-17244, 2020 WL 946973 (9th Cir. Feb. 27, 2020), a class of 8,185 consumers brought a class action against the credit reporting agency TransUnion LLC pursuant to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, alleging that TransUnion, knowing that its practice was unlawful, incorrectly placed terrorist alerts on the front page of consumers’ credit reports and later sent the consumers misleading and incomplete disclosures about the alerts and how to remove them. 
Continue Reading For the First Time in the Ninth Circuit, the Court Finds That All Class Members in a Class Action Must Have Standing to Recover Damages

A magistrate judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon recently made findings and recommendations to dismiss a purported class action against Kroger subsidiary Fred Meyer.  The suit alleges that the retailer’s background check process for prospective employees violates the Fair Credit Reporting Act by both failing to properly disclose that a report will be run, and failing to comply with the statute’s procedural requirements before taking adverse action against an applicant.
Continue Reading The Spokeo Chronicles: Another Tentative Background Check Win for Kroger Subsidiary

Recently, we discussed a decision that considered whether a former employee’s failure to initially list an employment discrimination claim on her bankruptcy schedules barred her from pursuing the claim against her former employer under the doctrine of judicial estoppel. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas considered the related question of whether a former employee plaintiff must reopen her bankruptcy case to list a Fair Labor Standards Act claim for failure to pay overtime wages and other claims discovered after the employee filed bankruptcy.
Continue Reading Plaintiff Lacks Standing to Pursue Claim that Was Discovered After Bankruptcy Filing