2023 delivered a banner year for investor recoveries, as the $7.9 billion in settlement funds across the globe was the highest total in the last five years. The $5.8 billion specifically secured in securities-related class actions in the U.S. was also up 18% from 2022.

In this ISS Insights post, ISS Securities Class Action Services, an industry pioneer and expert in global claims filing, portfolio monitoring, and research solutions, will highlight the largest settlements achieved during the year 2023. A substantive year in review will be documented in ISS SCAS’ forthcoming “Top 100 U.S. Class Action Settlements of All-Time” report, to be published in January 2024. In fact, four settlements in the calendar year were large enough to be featured within SCAS’ forthcoming Top 100 Report, including the $1 billion fiduciary duty-related settlement on behalf of Dell shareholders. The high-profile securities class actions resolved in 2023 include two against Wells Fargo for an aggregate value of $1.3 billion, as well as a $450 million settlement with Kraft Heinz. The mega settlements continue to drive up investor recoveries, as the top 10 largest securities settlements this year comprised $2.6 billion.

The plaintiffs seemingly earned a strategic victory in an antitrust lawsuit against the UFC in 2020. Nearly three years later, that win has been made official.

Federal judge Richard F. Boulware granted the plaintiffs class certification on Wednesday, according to a document from the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada. The lawsuit against the UFC, which was first filed in 2014, will now be a class action suit, meaning almost 1,200 fighters can sue the UFC as a collective for alleged unfair business practices.

The class period encompasses any fighter who competed in the UFC from Dec. 16, 2010, to June 30, 2017. The UFC plans to appeal the decision, the promotion told ESPN in a statement from its lead counsel, William A. Isaacson.

Boulware said he would be granting class certification in a status conference call in December 2020, but he did not file an official approval of the plaintiffs’ motion until Wednesday.

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The plaintiffs are seeking between $800 million and $1.6 billion in damages from the UFC. Boulware did not grant certification for the “identity class” part of the suit, where fighters claimed the UFC suppressed licensing fees associated with identity rights.

Energizer and Walmart cannot escape a trio of class actions accusing the battery manufacturer of giving the big box chain almost complete control over the retail price its batteries are sold for and forbidding other retailers from undercutting them.

U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts on Friday spent 21 pages laying out exactly why he was refusing to toss the three proposed class actions against Energizer Holdings Inc. and Walmart Inc., ultimately saying that for now, they had more than met their burden for accusing the companies of violating Section 1 of the Sherman Act.

In doing so, Judge Pitts also lifted the stay on discovery he had ordered in the case back in September 2023.

The battery buyers sufficiently allege both that there was an agreement and that the behavior was unreasonable, Judge Pitts said, which was enough to support their allegations until summary judgment.

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Dan Copeland and the indirect purchaser class are represented by Daniel Silverman, Alison Deich, Richard Koffman and John Bracken of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, and Sarah Grossman-Swenson and Kimberly Weber of McCracken Stemerman & Holsberry LLP.

Meat processing giant JBS USA Food Co. and a presumed class of meat plant workers have settled claims of wage-fixing in a lawsuit originally filed against nearly a dozen meat producers, according to a joint notice filed Monday.

The notice did not include the terms of the settlement, which it said would come in a motion for preliminary approval of the deal, and marks yet another company agreeing to resolve the dispute before a trial. The meat plant workers sued a slew of meat processors in November 2022, alleging that they shared compensation studies and data and worked together to ensure uniform pay policies across the industry in violation of federal antitrust laws.

Perdue and workers reached a settlement in December 2022, and the workers struck a $10 million settlement with Seaboard Foods LLC in August.

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The proposed class is represented by Shana E. Scarlett, Rio S. Pierce, Steve W. Berman and Abigail D. Pershing of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, George F. Farah, Rebecca Chang and Matthew K. Handley of Handley Farah & Anderson PLLC, and Brent W. Johnson, Benjamin D. Brown, Daniel Silverman and Alison Deich of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.

A civil rights organization claims two Washington, D.C., apartment complex owners discriminate against Black people by unlawfully creating boundaries for applicants with eviction or criminal backgrounds or who qualify for Section 8.

Civil rights organization Equal Rights Center said the owners of upscale apartment complexes Latrobe Apartment Homes and Vaughan Place created unlawful barriers for people who have criminal records more than seven years old and evictions more than three years old. The complexes also refused to accept applicants receiving housing vouchers, 95% of whom are Black residents, even though the complexes can, according to the complaint filed Thursday in Washington, D.C. superior court.

Brian Corman of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, counsel for ERC, told Law360 on Wednesday that this case emphasizes the importance of vouchers and the legal protections for voucher holders.

“Vouchers remove a lot of the barriers that would otherwise restrict low-income families from the ability to obtain housing outside of areas of poverty,” Corman said. “When there is voucher discrimination, voucher holders, a lot of the time, have to accept subpar housing in segregated neighborhoods or risk losing their voucher.”

Under Section 8, voucher holders are free to choose any housing in the rental market if it doesn’t exceed the monthly rent set by the D.C. Housing Authority. In February 2023, Latrobe Apartment Homes had one-bedroom units starting at $2,359 and Vaughn had one-bedroom units for $2,195 and the authority’s maximum rent was $2,467.

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ERC is represented by Brian Corman, Madhuri Belkale of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll and Joanna K. Wasik of Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.

A group of Flint residents, businesses and property owners have reached a settlement agreement worth $25 million with an engineering firm that consulted city officials after the 2014 Flint Water Crisis, according to a Thursday court filing.

Veolia North America, a Boston-based engineering firm, reached a $25 million settlement with a group of class action claimants in Flint. The class action lawsuit was originally launched in 2016, after plaintiffs said Veolia and another engineering firm that worked in Flint after the onset of the water crisis, Lockwood, Andrews and Newnam (LAN), failed to identify corroding pipes and acted too slowly to address the water contamination. The exact details of the settlement have not been made available yet.

The settlement agreement also includes payment of $1,500 for each minor claimant represented in the lawsuit, up to $1.5 million, according to attorneys.

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The settlement is in addition to a $626.25 million settlement reached between Flint residents and the state of Michigan, and others, in 2021. Ted Leopold, one of the plaintiffs’ court-appointed attorneys and co-lead trial counsel and partner at law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers and Toll, said payments from that settlement still haven’t been issued, citing procedural issues.

“The administrators are trying to expedite it as quickly as they can,” Leopold said Thursday. “We hope that this particular (payment) will move as expeditiously as possible.”

Leopold hopes the settlement agreement can bring at least a bit of relief to the Flint residents affected by the drinking water crisis.

“It was such a horrific episode,” he said. “Certainly, there’s some community history and decisions that were made by the state of Michigan and others that I think run very deep and personal. I like to say that litigation and closure can bring peace of mind and justice, hopefully we’ve got some semblance of that here. But there’s a long history there.”

An 11th Circuit opinion ruling that a nanny was entitled to overtime pay offers a rare deep dive into the contours of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s live-in domestic worker overtime exemption and shows the challenges of enforcing wage protections for household workers, attorneys say.

Under the FLSA, a worker “who is employed in domestic service in a household and who resides in such household” is not entitled to overtime pay. What it means to “reside” in a household while employed as a housekeeper and nanny was the central question before the 11th Circuit.

These questions do not often make their way to court, let alone become the focus of an appellate decision, because the dollar amounts at issue make costly litigation unattractive and domestic workers may fear speaking up.

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It also offers an analytical framework for how to wrestle with the question of what it means to reside in a household — an area that doesn’t have a lot of case law, said D. Michael Hancock, of counsel for worker-side firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC and former assistant administrator of the DOL’s WHD.

The discussion about how she didn’t have a key to the house or her own dedicated, private space, for example, contributed to the “common sense conclusion” that she was not part of the household, Hancock said.

“When people think about what your residence is, part of that is I can come and go as I please. I have a key. I have access,” he said. “They took a fairly practical approach … where they asked the question ‘let’s look at how this person’s day-to-day, week-to-week life unfolds.'”

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States and cities across the country, like Virginia and Philadelphia, have passed domestic worker bills of rights to ensure domestic workers have pay protections and rights to things like employment contracts and time off.

These efforts reflect a broader public appreciation for these critical workers and this opinion reinforces that, Hancock said.

“Just because they’re labeled a babysitter or just because they’re labeled a companion, doesn’t mean that they’re not entitled to be treated fairly and to be treated to the full protections of minimum wage and overtime,” he said. “Just because you’re a household and because you’re a family doesn’t provide you with an exemption from the FLSA writ large.”

A jury verdict finding Google liable for monopolising two Android app markets may be vulnerable to reversal due to conflicting precedent in Epic Games’ litigation against Apple, according to some antitrust experts.

After three hours of deliberations on Monday, a federal jury in California sided with Epic Games and determined that Google illegally monopolised Android app distribution and in-app purchases in a global market that excludes China. 

Google has already signalled it will appeal against the verdict and University of Pennsylvania law school professor Herbert Hovenkamp says it may prevail because the nine-member jury defined the relevant antitrust market in a manner that two federal courts have already rejected in Epic Games v Apple.

In that case, the US District Court for the Northern District of California Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected Epic’s definition of a “single-brand” aftermarket after concluding Epic had failed to demonstrate “significant” switching costs for and a lack of consumer knowledge that Apple’s App Store is the only place to download apps on iOS.

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had affirmed that conclusion in April.

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Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll partner Daniel McCuaig said Google will probably lean heavily on precedent from the Apple cases but cautioned that Google would have to satisfy the high standard of demonstrating a clear error for the jury’s finding of facts on matters like the relevant antitrust market.

He questioned how consumers could be expected to make an informed decision about these products.

“How could consumer purchasing decisions discipline either Apple or Google away from walling in its garden when there’s no daylight between them?”

A California federal judge on Monday refused to throw out a trimmed version of a lawsuit claiming that Meta Platforms Inc. illegally collected patients’ health information using a Facebook data tracking tool, ruling that their latest complaint has addressed some of his prior concerns.

U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick denied Meta’s motion to dismiss the suit, in particular rejecting Meta’s argument that the patients’ privacy claims are foreclosed at this stage in the litigation just because their communications with their healthcare providers may have been conducted via publicly available webpages.

“That fact is not irrelevant to the question of whether plaintiffs will ultimately be able to prove an invasion of privacy when considering the totality of the circumstances, but at this juncture and given that plaintiffs were communicating with their healthcare providers about their healthcare needs, plaintiffs have alleged enough for this claim to proceed to discovery,” Judge Orrick said.

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The healthcare plaintiffs are represented by Geoffrey Graber, Eric Kafka, and Claire Torchiana of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Jason “Jay” Barnes of Simmons Hanly Conroy LLC, Jeffrey A. Koncius of Kiesel Law LLP, Beth E. Terrell of Terrell Marshall Law Group PLLC and Andre M. Mura of Gibbs Law Group LLP.

Spirit said it saw “no basis” for termination. Just last week, both airlines said they intended to appeal a judge’s decision blocking the deal.

JetBlue Airways said on Friday that it might back out of a $3.8 billion acquisition of Spirit Airlines after a federal judge blocked the deal.

The announcement came just a week after JetBlue and Spirit had said they would appeal the decision, which was made in an antitrust case brought by the Justice Department.

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“It certainly seems like at this point at least this antitrust division is done letting airline mergers go through unchallenged,” said Dan McCuaig, a former antitrust trial lawyer at the Justice Department who is now a partner at the law firm Cohen Milstein.