A Michigan state judge has signed off on the historic $626 million settlement between Flint residents and government officials, marking the latest step in resolving sprawling litigation over lead contamination in the city’s drinking water.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced the Monday approval from Genesee County Judge David J. Newblatt, nearly three years after the settlement was first announced and well over a year after the federal judge who oversees consolidated state and federal Flint litigation approved it in a November 2021 order.
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A Friday Sixth Circuit ruling upheld a decision to award $202 million from the settlement fund to attorneys for five years’ worth of work that led up to the settlement with most of the defendants.
The Sixth Circuit rejected objectors’ bid to get detailed billing records from the firms in their attempt to challenge the lawyers’ cut of the settlement fund, finding the objectors didn’t have the right to obtain detailed discovery from the law firms.
The remainder of the $600 million settlement fund will be divided among class members and individual claimants, with the bulk of the funds, 80%, set aside for children and heavily weighted toward children who were exposed to lead at age 6 or younger. Another 15% of the funds will be distributed among adult claimants, 3% for property damage claims and 0.5% for businesses, with the remaining 2% designated for local school districts to provide special education services to affected students.
About 43,000 people filed claims before a 2022 deadline to join the settlement, and the claims are under review by a court-appointed administrator, Archer Systems LLC, and additional firms Wolf Garretson LLC and Alvarez & Marsal Disputes and Investigations LLC, brought on in February to assist with the claims processing.
The settlement does not include the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is a defendant in some of the suits, or two engineering firms that declined to join the settlement.
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The Flint water plaintiffs are represented by co-lead class counsel Theodore J. Leopold of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC and Michael L. Pitt of Pitt McGehee Palmer Bonanni & Rivers PC and co-liaison counsel for individual plaintiffs Hunter Shkolnik of Napoli Shkolnik PLLC and Corey M. Stern of Levy Konigsberg LLP.
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A Michigan federal judge on Monday certified 26 statewide classes of drivers who claim General Motors sold vehicles with faulty transmissions that caused shudders and hard shifts that made the vehicles difficult to stop and sometimes made it feel as if they had been rear-ended.
U.S. District Court Judge David M. Lawson also appointed Theodore Leopold of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll as lead counsel and about 30 named plaintiffs to serve as class representatives.
The certified class includes purchasers of GM vehicles with one of two models of an eight-speed automatic transmission – including Chevy Silverado, Chevrolet Colorado, Chevrolet Corvette, Chevrolet Camaro, Cadillac Escalade and other models with the 8L transmission – that were manufactured between 2015 and March 1, 2019, and who bought the vehicle from an authorized GM dealer before March 1, 2019.
Several class actions were consolidated in September 2019. The class alleges the two transmission models caused significant shaking and shuddering when changing gears. Some drivers said they were nervous to drive the vehicles because they had “alarming difficulties” stopping when a “hard shift” would cause the vehicles to surge forward, causing some to almost hit other vehicles or pedestrians.
Leopold told Law360 he was pleased by Judge Lawson’s order.
“As our lawsuit continues, now certified as a class action, we look forward to demonstrating that General Motors knew before the first car left GMs manufacturing facilities that their 8-speed transmissions were defective yet continuously made the business decision to still sell their cars knowing full well of the vehicle defects and safety concerns,” Leopold said in a statement.
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The class is represented by Theodore Leopold, Doug McNamara and Karina Puttieva of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, Russel D. Paul of Berger Montague PC, Melissa L. Troutner of Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check LLP, Tarek Zohdy of Capstone Law PAC, E. Powell Miller of the Miller Law Firm, Steven Calamusa of Gorden & Partners PA and Gretchen Freeman Cappio of Keller Rohrback LLP.
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- Common Issues Dominate; Classwide Damages Method Shown
- Affected models include Camaro, Escalade, Silverado, Yukon
General Motors LLC must faces class actions by drivers in 26 states who allege flawed transmissions made their vehicles “slip, buck, kick, jerk and harshly engage.”
At issue are certain 2015-2019 GM cars and trucks equipped with Hydra-Matic 8L90 and 8L45 transmissions. Five separate suits were combined before Judge David M. Lawson of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, who granted certification on Monday for statewide classes including Florida, New York, and Texas.
Affected vehicles include Chevrolet Silverado, Colorado, Corvette, and Camaro models; Cadillac Escalade, Escalade ESV ATS, ATS-V, CTS, CT6, and CTS-V models; and GMC Sierra, Yukon, Yukon XL, Yukon Denali XL, and Canyon models.
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Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC was appointed lead class counsel. Bush Seyferth PLLC and Kirkland & Ellis LLP represent GM.
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U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra of the Southern District of Florida ordered the banana company to stand trial in January 2024 for allegedly financing paramilitary death squads in Colombia.
Seventeen families suing U.S.-based banana grower Chiquita Brands International for its alleged role in funding paramilitary death squads in Colombia will get their day in court next January.
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Chiquita pleaded guilty in 2007 to financing a designated global terrorist group in a U.S. criminal case, and agreed to pay a $25 million fine.
Subsequently, thousands of victims represented by various groups of lawyers filed suit against Chiquita in federal courts across the U.S. Those suits were consolidated and are being heard in federal district court for the Southern District of Florida in West Palm Beach.
The case is proceeding with a handful of bellwether cases that are to be tried first.
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“Our clients have been waiting decades for justice, so we are gratified that the court has set a trial date and look forward to presenting our evidence to a jury,” said Agnieszka Fryszman, chair of the Human Rights Practice Group at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, who also represents plaintiffs in the bellwether cases.
“Our clients allege that the deaths and injuries at the heart of this case were a direct and foreseeable result of Chiquita’s financial support of the AUC—a paramilitary group designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization—payments that should never have been made,” Fryszman said.
In addition to EarthRights and Cohen Milstein, counsel for the plaintiffs include Paul L. Hoffman of Schonbrun Seplow Harris Hoffman & Zeldes and Judith Brown Chomsky, Anthony DiCaprio and Arturo Carrillo.
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A judge has granted class action certification to a lawsuit involving 39 plaintiffs across 26 states — including Michigan — that accuses General Motors of knowingly selling cars with faulty transmissions.
On Monday, David Lawson, U.S. District judge for the Eastern District of Michigan, granted class certification in the case of Speerly vs. GM, which represents the owners of various GM vehicles who have one of two models of eight-speed automatic transmissions — the GM 8L90 or 8L45 — made between 2015 and March 1, 2019.
The transmissions lurch and shutter when driving, creating a safety hazard, the lawsuit said.
The Renaissance Center, headquarters of General Motors, on the Detroit River in downtown Detroit.
“General Motors knowingly sold over 800,000 eight-speed transmission vehicles, which they knew to be defective for years, and yet made the business decision not to tell its customers before purchase,” said Ted Leopold, partner at Cohen Milstein and court-appointed lead counsel for the class action case. “Dealers were directed to tell the customers that harsh shifts were ‘normal’ or ‘characteristic.’ Such decision making is both highly irresponsible and emblematic of what GM believes it can get away with.”
Read on Detroit Free Press.
A New York federal judge certified one of three proposed investor classes in a suit alleging Credit Suisse tricked investors into buying a series of short-term notes inversely tied to stock market volatility in 2018, finding two of the proposed classes can’t be certified because they conflict with one another.
U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres issued an order on Thursday granting certification to the investors’ proposed Securities Act class, which includes all individuals and entities that purchased or acquired Inverse VIX exchange-traded notes, also known as XIV notes, pursuant or traceable to the bank’s offering documents, and were subsequently damaged.
The judge denied certification to proposed classes identified as the misrepresentation and manipulation classes. The manipulation class would have included all individuals and entities that purchased or acquired XIV notes between Jan. 29 and Feb. 5, 2018, and the manipulation class was proposed to include those who sold or redeemed the notes on or after Feb. 5, 2018.
Judge Torres said in her order that the Securities Act class satisfies all the requirements of Rule 23(a), such as numerosity, typicality and commonality, to warrant certification, and she rejected Credit Suisse’s argument that the plaintiffs “suffer from various infirmities” that preclude them from serving as class representatives.
The four plaintiffs, Set Capital LLC, Apollo Asset Ltd., Aleksandr Gamburg and Stefan Jager, intended to represent all three classes.
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In addition to ruling on certification in her order, Judge Torres approved Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC and Levi & Korsinsky LLP as class counsel.
“Plaintiffs’ counsel diligently investigated the claims in this case, drafted a detailed complaint, survived a motion to dismiss on appeal, and have further investigated the claims in discovery. Plaintiffs’ counsel also has extensive experience in class action litigation, including securities class actions,” she said.
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The investors are represented by Michael B. Eisenkraft, Laura H. Posner, Steven J. Toll, Brendan Schneiderman and Carol V. Gilden of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, and Eduard Korsinsky, Nicholas I. Porritt, Adam M. Apton and Alexander Krot of Levi Korsinsky LLP.
- Signature Bank, Silicon Valley audited by KPMG
- Auditors responsible for raising red flags about viability
Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank collapsed days apart within two weeks of their auditor KPMG LLP signing off on their books.
The Big Four audit firm’s responsibility included assessing the odds of whether the banks could survive the next 12 months. Regulators shuttered Silicon Valley and placed it into Federal Deposit Insurance Co. receivership two weeks after KPMG signed off on the bank’s financials. Signature Bank made it 11 days.
Auditors aren’t fortune tellers, but they are responsible for making sure corporate financials give a fair and up-to-date portrayal of the company’s financial health. With two clients collapsing within days of each other—Silicon Valley fell Friday, and regulators raced to shut down Signature Bank on Sunday night—KPMG’s work will come under scrutiny.
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‘A Lot of Smoke’
But the close proximity between the clean audit reports and the crashes indicates important information was either missing or ignored, said Laura Posner, who represents institutional investors in securities fraud class actions and has sued Big Four audit firms previously.
Auditors should have considered whether liquidity challenges and threats from still-rising interest rates posed substantial risks to the company going forward, said Posner, a partner with Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.
“I certainly would argue that there are a lot of red flags, a lot of smoke,” she said. “The timing is really problematic.”
Read the complete article on Bloomberg Tax.
- Workers sufficiently alleged they were employees
- Challenge to willfulness allegations also fails
The Salvation Army lost its bid to throw out allegations it owes vulnerable people who live and work in its adult rehabilitation centers minimum and overtime wages.
The workers—who say they receive $7 to $25 per week in cash, along with room and board and rehabilitation services—argue that the total value of what they receive doesn’t meet state and federal minimum wage requirements. Their allegations, including as to their status as employees, are sufficient to move forward, the US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia said.
The four named plaintiffs, who seek to represent a Fair Labor Standards Act collective and a state-law class, worked at the religious nonprofit’s ARCs in Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida. All four say they worked at least 40 hours per week, and two allegedly worked more than that every week. They’re suing the entity responsible for Salvation Army’s southern region, which comprises 15 states and Washington, DC.
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Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld LLP, Rukin Hyland & Riggin LLP, and Radford & Keebaugh LLC represent the workers. Crowell & Moring LLP and Alpharetta, Ga.-based Evan R. Mermelstein represent Salvation Army.
Read the complete story on Bloomberg Law (subscription required).
Janssen Biotech Inc. must hand over its communications with federal agencies regarding a former employee’s claims filed on behalf of the government that the company paid doctors kickbacks to boost its drug sales, a Boston federal judge ordered.
Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge M. Page Kelley settled a crossfire of discovery motions in an order Thursday that found Janssen’s communications with the federal government about the claims were “undeniably relevant and not privileged” and should be handed over to relator Julie Long.
The ruling gives Janssen two weeks to provide Long its communications with the U.S. Department of Justice, the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
The biotech was also ordered to produce contracts it had with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP which disclose how much Janssen paid the firm to run free phone seminars for physicians about changes in Medicare rates.
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The discovery orders issued Thursday followed Long’s insistence that Janssen was “stonewalling” her on the case by delaying court-ordered production plans. But Janssen had countered that Long was the one causing “unnecessary delays” with her burdensome demands.
Long’s attorney Theodore Leopold of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC said in a statement Friday that his client is cleared with the ruling.
“We look forward to getting the long-delayed document production and relevant names of those individuals involved with the decision-making that has led to this litigation,” Leopold said.
Representatives for Janssen were not immediately available for comment on Friday.
Julie Long is represented by Jonathan Shapiro and Lynn G. Weissberg of Stern Shapiro Weissberg & Garin and Casey M. Preston, Gary L. Azorsky, Jeanne A. Markey, Leslie Kroeger, Theodore Jon Leopold, Diana L. Martin and Poorad Razavi of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.
Read the article on Law360.
Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. has been hit with another proposed class action over its allegedly anti-competitive practice of bundling several of its vaccines for children to maintain its monopoly power in the rotavirus vaccine market, this time brought by third-party payors who indirectly paid for or reimbursed rotavirus vaccines.
In the suit filed Friday, Baltimore’s mayor and City Council claim that Merck had already bundled several of its pediatric vaccines before GlaxoSmithKline PLC released its Rotarix vaccine. However, as it prepared for GSK’s introduction of the competing rotavirus vaccine, Merck added a condition to its contracts requiring customers to buy all or nearly all of their pediatric rotavirus vaccines from Merck. If they didn’t, customers would face substantial price penalties on all other bundled Merck vaccines, according to the complaint.
That allowed Merck to charge supracompetitive prices to purchasers of its vaccines, Baltimore said. And those prices are passed along to patients and third-party payors, such as the city and other putative class members, it said.
“Due to the Merck bundle, instead of significantly decreasing the price of RotaTeq when GSK entered the market, as would normally be expected to result from competitive entry into a monopoly market, Merck has maintained the price of RotaTeq at supracompetitive levels, actually increasing its list price despite facing competition from GSK,” the city said.
And as a result, the city and others have paid — and continue to pay — artificially inflated prices for the rotavirus vaccines, Baltimore added.
Baltimore said it’s suing on behalf of hundreds of thousands of third-party payors in so-called “repealer jurisdictions,” or states or districts that have repealed the bar on indirect purchaser plaintiffs seeking recovery. Those jurisdictions include California, Michigan, Nebraska, Oregon, New York and the District of Columbia, among others.
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Baltimore is represented by Eric L. Cramer, Russell D. Paul, David Langer and Daniel J. Walker of Berger Montague PC, Daniel H. Silverman, Leonardo Chingcuanco and Sharon K. Robertson of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC and Ebony Thompson and Jane Lewis of the City of Baltimore’s Department of Law.
Read the complete article on Law360.