End-payor plaintiffs asked a New Jersey federal judge Tuesday to give final approval of a $35 million settlement resolving their antitrust claims against Pfizer over the cholesterol medication Lipitor.

The proposed settlement will put an end to claims from the end payors, which represent a class of third-party payors and a class of consumers who purchased, paid, and/or reimbursed for branded Lipitor or generic Lipitor in 24 states and the District of Columbia, that Pfizer conspired with Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. to delay the release of a generic Lipitor to monopolize the market.

U.S. District Judge Peter G. Sheridan gave preliminary approval to the settlement on June 3.

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The end payors are represented by Lisa J. Rodriguez of Dilworth Paxson LLP, Sharon Robertson of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Kenneth A. Wexler of Wexler Boley & Elgersma LLP, Michael Buchman of Motley Rice LLC and Robert G. Eisler of Grant & Eisenhofer PA.

As new rules went into effect this month following a March settlement between home sellers and the National Association of Realtors, two legal experts have differing opinions on the real estate market’s outlook as changes come to standard contracts for representation and commission payments.

The recent $418 million joint agreement sought to resolve two antitrust cases in which the plaintiffs brought claim against the NAR over its compensation rules with the Multiple Listing Service cooperative compensation model rule. In Moehrl v. National Association of Realtors, the plaintiffs, home sellers who listed their homes on MLSs, accused NAR and others of allegedly conspiring to use the mandatory buyer broker commission rule. The plaintiffs claimed these long-standing practices have inflated the cost of broker commissions, which have largely been nonnegotiable and to be paid by the home seller.

Although the agreement is still awaiting approval by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, new rules went into effect Aug. 17, which aim to allow buyers and sellers more freedom to negotiate commission costs.

Some of the biggest changes require homebuyers to enter into a buyer representation agreement with their potential realtor before showings happen. Another change is a shift in who foots the bill for the commission fees. Historically, the sellers have paid about 6% of the home’s sale price, with 3% going to the seller’s agent and 3% going to the buyer’s agent. With the rule changes, the compensation amounts are no longer listed in an MLS, and it’s up to the home seller and buyer to determine who pays those fees.

Robert Braun, a partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll in Washington, D.C., helped lead the plaintiffs to the settlement with the NAR. He told Law.com that he remains hopeful that the settlement will provide more transparency to a market that has been notoriously riddled with requirements and restrictions.

“We continue to be very pleased by the settlement agreement,” Braun said. “We think that it’s important, and includes really significant reforms to the residential real estate brokerage market that should bring relief to sellers and homebuyers.”

Braun also said that he thinks the new landscape could lead to innovative ideas being generated in the real estate brokerage industry, whereas parties were previously stuck with a traditional process in which compensation was fixed on a MLS listing.

“Our hope and expectation is that the settlement agreement will lower transaction costs for sellers and buyers, and will create opportunities in the residential real estate brokerage space for new business models that didn’t exist before, are more efficient than what existed in the past, and are cheaper for buyers and sellers,” he said.

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Braun cautioned that while some may be worried about confusing language in the agreements, the updated requirements are buyer-friendly and work to bring clarity to prospective homeowners.

“I do think there are people who have an interest in instilling confusion, but one of its requirements is that buyer-brokers have to disclose at the beginning of the relationship exactly what they’re charging to buyers, and get buyers permission on that pricing,” Braun said. “We think that’s important and will result in increased transparency to buyers, and that it will empower buyers to negotiate a commission that they’re being required to pay.”

Braun added that, ultimately, the decision of whether to use an agent lies with the sellers or buyers, which he said is consistent with the results of the NAR settlement.

“It should be up to individual sellers and buyers and their circumstances to decide whether a real estate agent could help them, or whether they want to save money by forgoing an agent,” Braun said. “Different people have different circumstances and our belief is that this settlement gives consumers better choices about who they hire, and how much they want to pay.”

A Colorado federal judge refused to toss a proposed class action accusing a radiology company and its trustee of overcharging the company’s employee stock ownership plan in a $163.7 million sale, saying the former workers’ complaint puts forward enough details to back up their allegations.

In a text-only order Thursday, U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney denied Envision Management Holding Inc. and Argent Trust Co.’s motions to dismiss Robert Harrison and Grace Heath’s Employee Retirement Income Security Act lawsuit.

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“We are pleased with the court’s decision, which protects the rights of employees that have ESOP accounts,” Michelle C. Yau, who represents Harrison and Heath, told Law360. “Our clients are eager to prove their meritorious claims.”

Harrison and Heath are represented by Caroline E. Bressman, Eleanor E. Frisch, Kai H. Richter, Michelle C. Yau, Ryan A. Wheeler and Joseph M. Sellers of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.

Hormel Foods Corp. and two meat processing plants have agreed to a $13.5 million settlement in a Colorado wage-fixing suit, joining a host of companies that have reached deals to end claims that they colluded to depress wages.

In a joint notice of settlement filed Wednesday in Colorado federal court, attorneys for plant workers said the forthcoming agreement would resolve all claims against Hormel; one of its Illinois-based facilities, Rochelle Foods LLC; and a Minnesota-based processing plant, Quality Pork Processors Inc.

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The proposed class is represented by Shana E. Scarlett, Rio S. Pierce, Abby R. Wolf, Steve W. Berman, Elaine T. Byszewski and Abigail D. Pershing of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, George F. Farah, Rebecca P. Chang, Nicholas J. Jackson, Martha E. Guarnieri and William H. Anderson of Handley Farah & Anderson PLLC, Brent W. Johnson, Benjamin D. Brown, Robert A. Braun, Alison S. Deich, Zachary R. Glubiak, Zachary I. Krowitz, Daniel H. Silverman and Nina Jaffe-Geffner of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Brian D. Clark, Stephen J. Teti, Arielle S. Wagner and Eura Chang of Lockridge Grindal Nauen PLLP, and Candice J. Enders and Julia R. McGrath of Berger Montague PC.

Customs and Border Protection’s settlement addresses pregnancy discrimination, policy changes and training for managers that could improve the agency’s culture.

Under an image of the Statue of Liberty, set against a waving American flag, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) website describes the agency’s commitment to “nondiscrimination in the workforce.”

CBP’s self-praise includes its dedication “to preserving individual liberty, fairness and equality under the law.”

But those notions of nondiscrimination and fairness took a big hit last week with a tentative Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) legal settlement that would award $45 million to CBP employees who were discriminated against because of their pregnancies. Rather than affirming federal law, the case points to the agency’s violation of the law, specifically the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

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“I don’t think there was anything malicious about this,” Joseph Sellers, a partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, said of the discrimination during a telephone interview. His firm and Gilbert Employment Law represented a group of more than 1,000 women who work at CBP, who will receive between about $7,000 and $100,000 each, depending on individual circumstances. Included in the $45 million for CBP employees is $9 million in attorneys’ fees.

If maliciousness didn’t play a role, there was “probably a paternalistic view about pregnancy,” he added, among supervisors who doubted the ability of pregnant employees to do the job or the safety of the fetuses when those employees were on their regular assignments.

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Certainly, there are situations that could be especially hazardous for pregnant officers, such as chasing suspects. But when agency witnesses were asked what percentage of the time those situations occur, Sellers said, “they described it as a very, very small.” Furthermore, the officers work in teams, so during the few times a CBP operation could be hazardous for a pregnant officer, a colleague could take the needed action.

A proposed class of car buyers is urging a Michigan federal court not to dismiss their suit claiming General Motors sold vehicles with defective transmissions, saying the automaker hid the defect, so they couldn’t have discovered it until recently.

In a brief filed Tuesday, the buyers, led by Cole Ulrich, said General Motors LLC affirmatively hid the problems with its eight-speed transmission by publishing “evolving” technical service bulletins instructing its repair shops to tell car owners that the symptoms of the defect were “normal” or to do ineffectual repairs.

Ulrich argued that these tactics delayed the discovery of the defect despite their due diligence, as the representations made by repair technicians obfuscated their existence so that GM could induce them not to pursue claims.

Because the repairs did not address the defects or tell the plaintiffs that there was in fact a defect, GM cannot argue now that the claims came too late, according to the brief. The plaintiffs further argue that GM knew that one of the defects, described as “harsh shift,” could not be fixed. It began redesigning the transmission entirely to address it but still hid its existence and told its technicians to do nothing about it, they said.

The plaintiffs further argued that no information was publicly disclosed about the redesign until 2023, and no information about attempts to correct defective transmission fluid was disclosed until 2019, after their purchases.

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Theodore Leopold of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, representing the plaintiffs, said Wednesday, “We believe the facts and law support that the Court deny the motion to dismiss as it did with the other 26 states previously, and that these customers get a chance to certify their claims as a class.”

For the 6th time, Cohen Milstein has ranked among the “Ceiling Smashers” in the Law360 Pulse Women in Law Report. Ranking among the top 3 firms with 101-250 attorneys, Cohen Milstein is recognized as a firm with the most female attorneys in the equity partnership.

According to Law360 Pulse’s 2024 Women In Law Report, although women make up around 41% of all lawyers, they hold just over a quarter of equity partner positions across the industry. Again, this year’s ranking uses a pipeline score methodology with benchmarks to indicate whether firms are keeping pace with the talent pipeline in hiring, promoting and retaining female attorneys.

Despite the broader industry challenges, the firms that made it onto Law360 Pulse’s Ceiling Smashers list are demonstrating that strides towards gender parity in the upper ranks are possible.

See more about the Glass Ceiling Report.

The opacity of workplace artificial intelligence tools poses a daunting challenge for plaintiff-side employment lawyers who think that technology causes discriminatory results.

Though the inner workings of AI systems remain difficult to access, lawyers say they’re bringing discrimination charges based on publicly available information. They’re suing the vendors of the tools directly, rather than the employers that use them, and they’re applying existing law in new ways.

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Christine Webber, co-chair of Cohen Milstein’s civil rights and employment practice, also said she’d prefer to sue vendors directly — she framed it as going straight to the source of the discrimination.

“My goal has always been to go after the vendors first. Here’s my theory why. Because any given vendor has dozens, hundreds of customers,” she said. “Let me sue the vendor once and deal with all of it instead of having to sue 100 different employers to accomplish the same thing.”

Another benefit of suing vendors directly is that it could help boost plaintiffs’ access to information that might otherwise be sealed off, Webber pointed out.

In the Workday case, because Workday is a direct defendant and the judge has found they can be held liable under the law, Workday may have a harder time keeping the details of its algorithms under seal by claiming they’re trade secrets.

“It’s going to be a lot harder for them to say, ‘Oh, trade secret, we shouldn’t have to disclose it,'” so as not to be at a disadvantage to competitors, she said. “Obviously, the plaintiffs in the case are not a competitor. I don’t really see what the basis would be for denying that sort of discovery.”

Shout-out to lawyers at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll and Gilbert Employment Law who secured a $45 million settlement from Customs and Border Protection on behalf of 1,000 employees who claimed the agency discriminated against pregnant workers. Plaintiffs initially filed the lawsuit in 2016 with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. They claimed CBP forced pregnant employees onto light duty, which often included worse schedules and no overtime. The class is represented by Joseph Sellers, Phoebe Wolfe, Harini Srinivasan and Megan Reif of Cohen Milstein and Gary Gilbert, Shannon Leary, Cori Cohen and Rachel Petro of Gilbert Employment Law.

The growing use of artificial intelligence in hiring and other workplace decisions has the plaintiffs bar playing catch-up, trying to figure out how and when AI is being used.

Employers aren’t often obligated to disclose when they’re using AI to evaluate applicants, and even if they are, the tools themselves are a so-called black box. That opacity has so far put the worker side at a big disadvantage, lawyers and employee advocates told Law360.

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For now, applicants must do some of the work themselves. Once they know they’ve been assessed by an AI tool and turned down, said Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC partner Christine Webber, an enterprising applicant could start “looking at the pattern of decisions … who has been hired, and come to a reasonable conclusion that this seems to be having an adverse impact.” Webber co-chairs the plaintiff-side firm’s civil rights and employment practice.

Yoshihara added that many employers are not “doing what they should be doing in terms of testing” AI tools for biased impacts before deploying them.

But the Mobley case may prove key, Scherer said. If Workday can’t prove it tested the tool and found it fair, “I don’t see how Workday avoids letting them get under the hood to see what data was used to develop and train it, because that might shed light on whether there actually was a possibility that it had a disparate impact,” Scherer said.

Webber has brought disparate impact cases in the housing sphere, where housing providers that use information from consumer reporting agencies are required to tell rejected applicants that they were turned away based on that information.

She said some of the information she would want in order to build an employment case includes programming instructions, the data the tool was trained on and whether that data changed over time, and whether the tool used only machine learning or if a human was involved.

Webber would also be looking to see what parameters were used as controls for the tool, what kinds of feedback the tool received from humans during its development, how it was tested and how it performed on those tests. She’s watching closely to see what comes out of the discovery process in the Mobley case.

“Thinking through what’s the best regulation of these types of tools — which a lot of states are looking at — where are the risk factors, what are the things we need to worry about?” Webber said. “Having the chance to really get your hands in the guts of it and do a little dissection and learn how it works I just think would be interesting.”