Attorneys for President Donald Trump urged a federal judge to rule that Trump is entitled to presidential immunity from civil claims that he instigated a mob’s attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election.

The lawmakers’ lawyers argue Trump can’t prove he was acting entirely in his official capacity rather than as an office-seeking private individual. And the U.S. Supreme Court has held that office-seeking conduct falls outside the scope of presidential immunity, they contend.

“President Trump has the burden of proof here,” said plaintiffs’ attorney Joseph Sellers. “We submit that he hasn’t come anywhere close to satisfying that burden.”

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta didn’t rule from the bench after hearing arguments from Trump attorneys and lawyers for Democratic members of Congress who sued the Republican president and allies over the Jan. 6. 2021, attack. At the end of the hearing, Mehta said the arguments gave him “a lot to think about” and he would rule “as soon as we can.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat who chaired the House Homeland Security Committee, sued Trump, his personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani and members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers extremist groups over the Jan. 6 riot. Other Democratic members of Congress later joined the litigation.

WASHINGTON – A man who transported patients to medical appointments is suing his former employer, alleging he was unlawfully fired after failing a criminal background check despite — he says — years on the job without incident.

James Blakney says he was abruptly fired last year after working for nearly three years transporting patients to and from medical appointments. According to a lawsuit filed in D.C. federal court, Blakney had passed three criminal background checks during his employment.

The lawsuit names Missouri-based Medical Transportation Management Inc. (MTM), which subcontracts with Maryland-based OnTime Transportation. Blakney began working for OnTime and MTM around June 2021, according to the complaint.

Blakney claims MTM maintains a zero-tolerance policy for violent convictions or charges — regardless of how old they are or an employee’s job performance — and argues that policy violates the D.C. Human Rights Act.

The suit alleges the policy has a discriminatory impact on Black workers.

“We did our time. We did everything,” Blakney said. “We shouldn’t have to keep going through this over and over again… especially after 15, 20 years that the case is over and done with.”

Advocates say broad criminal background bans can disproportionately affect Black applicants.

Sarah Bessell of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs says that while Black residents make up about 50 percent of D.C.’s population, they account for a significantly larger share of felony convictions.

“That means a blanket criminal background policy is going to have an outsized impact on Black workers,” Bessell said.

The agency is unlawfully giving up on fighting disparate impact discrimination—meaning it’s “open season” on employees.

In August of 2022, just after Prime Day, Leah Cross started working as an Amazon delivery driver in Colorado. She took the job because she had long heard that it was a decent and paid well. She thought it would be a way to get her foot in with a reputable company that offered good benefits. But in the end, “It was kind of the complete opposite of my experience there,” she said.

What Cross found soon after starting was “shocking,” she said. The company gave her quotas so high that she was making over 200 stops a day; each stop could include delivering to a dozen homes. She was closely monitored by video cameras, and if she started to lag behind the company’s targets, a supervisor would call her. She was working 10-to-12-hour days, but the quotas meant that she didn’t have any time for necessary breaks. One day early in her employment at Amazon, she stopped to get menstruation products and got a disciplinary call from a dispatch officer. Normally, that would have resulted in a write-up, but she got away with a verbal warning.

The inability to take bathroom breaks became a particular problem. If she stopped at a bathroom along her route, she would receive calls from supervisors asking where she had gone and if she was lost. Higher-ups told her that in order to meet the company’s quotas, she would have to buy “devices,” she recalled—she ended up getting a funnel that facilitated urinating into a water bottle. She tried to hold her bladder for as long as possible, but once it became “a dire situation,” she said, she had to close the van doors and urinate into a bottle in the back, carefully avoiding the surveillance cameras. She started bringing a gym bag packed with supplies: bottles to hold urine, trash bags to dispose of them, and extra clothes in case she peed on what she was wearing. “It kind of felt like you were loading up to go to war just to deliver some packages,” she said. Sometimes she would open the van doors after she was done only to be confronted by a waiting customer looking for a package, flooding her with embarrassment.

Cross’s inability to take regular bathroom breaks led to kidney issues and yeast infections. Even today, she deals with the aftereffects, having to remind herself that at her job at a nursing home she can use the bathroom whenever she needs to. “It’s something I still got to work on and get over,” she said.

In May 2023, Cross filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Division, a state-level agency that processes workplace discrimination claims under state law as well as on behalf of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the sole federal agency tasked with enforcing private sector workers’ rights. She alleged that Amazon discriminated against her and other delivery drivers by imposing such demanding quotas that they were forced go without bathroom breaks, a practice she alleged had a disparate impact on people with vaginas who struggled to pee into bottles. “Disparate impact” is a legal standard that requires courts to look at the impact, not the intent, of laws to determine if they are discriminatory. To find that Amazon had discriminated on a disparate impact basis, the agency wouldn’t need to uncover evidence of deliberate discrimination against women; even a universal policy like denying all workers bathroom breaks could be discriminatory if it disproportionately harmed a protected class of workers under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. Cross’s claim was later transferred to the EEOC. The agency told her in December 2024 it was “very interested” in moving forward with her case. Cross described herself as a wallflower, not eager to bring a spotlight to herself, but she knew that bringing the case would represent “something much greater than just my life.”

But in late September, Cross was notified by the EEOC that her charge was being closed. It wasn’t for a lack of evidence of discrimination; it didn’t have anything to do with the merits of her allegation at all. The agency had, contra years of precedent, its own statute, and settled law, decided to abandon all disparate impact discrimination charges and litigation.

. . .

Disparate impact cases involve employer policies or practices that appear to be neutral but result in a discriminatory outcome without having any relevance to the job itself. Think of a height and weight test to be a firefighter, a poor substitute for a strength test that excludes women, or mandatory medical exams for retail jobs that systematically shut out people with disabilities who could otherwise perform the work. Proving that something violates the disparate impact standard doesn’t require proving that there was intent to discriminate, which is a high bar to clear, just that the outcome was unnecessarily discriminatory.

. . .

In doing so, the agency is likely violating the law, said Jenny Yang, a partner at law firm Outten Golden and former EEOC chair, and Joseph Sellers, a partner at Cohen Milstein. The Supreme Court has consistently found that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits disparate impact discrimination, dating back to a 1971 case. Then Congress overwhelmingly passed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which codified disparate impact discrimination as prohibited by Title VII. “This is clearly established law,” Sellers said.

To have the agency abandon it, then, is “probably unlawful,” Sellers said. Under statute, the agency must look into all claims workers file. Executive orders don’t have the legal authority to change or enact law, and disparate impact has been written into law for 34 years. “The agency has made a blanket decision that is at odds with its statutory mandate to enforce the law,” Yang said.

“There’s never been a wholesale refusal to process disparate impact claims before,” Sellers said. “This is entirely new and extraordinary.”

. . .

Without the EEOC pursuing these claims, and with many workers unable to carry them forward on their own, it “permits these long-standing practices that may not be justified as a matter of law to continue,” Sellers said. Employers, no longer fearing enforcement from the EEOC, won’t have an incentive to fix discriminatory policies. They might even fear incurring the wrath of the Trump administration if they collect data and try to remedy any potentially discriminatory practices. Hiring practices that disproportionately keep Black people or women out, or workplace policies that unnecessarily harm Latinos or people with disabilities, will remain unchecked. Companies will say to themselves, “This is not something we have to worry about,” Lopez said, “because who’s going to come after us?

Thirty years ago this month, Congress overrode a presidential veto to enact a law that changed the landscape of shareholder class action lawsuits. How the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act will continue to change that landscape remains a live issue as courts continue to wrestle with the question of how investors can prove that they’ve been injured by alleged corporate malfeasance.

The PSLRA was passed into law on Dec. 22, 1995, in an effort to address what some lawmakers saw as abusive litigation tactics by shareholders who were allegedly filing frivolous lawsuits for quick payouts.

Whether and to what extent it has cut down on such lawsuits continues to be a hotly debated matter between the plaintiff and defense bars, and those debates are playing out in the courts.

The law came into effect under a cloud of controversy, having been adopted over the objections of then-President Bill Clinton, who vetoed the legislation over fears that it would “have the effect of closing the courthouse door on investors who have legitimate claims.”

But since the PSLRA’s adoption, institutional investors like pension funds have emerged as powerhouse plaintiffs in shareholder class action lawsuits, in part due to a provision in the law that directs judges to consider appointing the plaintiff with the greatest financial stake to lead the case.

Those institutional investors have been able to use their growing influence over the class litigation process to push for high-dollar settlements, according to investor-side attorney Daniel Sommers of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.

According to Institutional Shareholder Services, over 90% of the largest securities class action settlements entered into since the PSLRA came into effect were in cases led by institutional investors.

Cornerstone Research has reported that between 2015 and 2023, securities class actions settled for an average amount of $50.7 million, while a 2008 paper by Elliott J. Weiss in the Vanderbilt Law Review said pre-PSLRA settlements “rarely” topped $20 million.

“There’s no question that there’s a connection between the emergence of institutional investors as lead plaintiffs and larger recoveries,” Sommers said.

He said institutional investors often have in-house counsel who can supervise their involvement in litigation and often require outside counsel to provide detailed analysis of potential new cases, leading to them only taking on cases that are strongest on their merits and could include large settlements.

Sommers said that winning large recoveries for wronged investors “is consistent with one of the principal goals of the PSLRA — encouraging meritorious cases with significant investor harm while at the same time discouraging weak cases with little investor harm.”

. . .

But courts have been “articulating and rearticulating” what the heightened pleading standard requires ever since the PSLRA was enacted and the Supreme Court has itself already addressed the issue in 2007’s Tellabs Inc. v. Makor Issues & Rights Ltd. , Sommers said.

“It really is so fact bound and so subject to interpretation by a particular district court judge that I don’t think that there’s sort of any broader legal analysis or changes in interpretation of the statute that can be or will be made,” he said.

Whether plaintiffs can meet the heightened standard needed to defeat a motion to dismiss is important because, under the PSLRA, discovery doesn’t kick off until a judge rules on that motion.

A Washington federal judge on Thursday appointed Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP and DiCello Levitt LLP as interim co-lead counsel over consolidated claims that Zillow paid kickbacks to brokers for referrals to its own mortgage services, among other anticompetitive conduct using company agents. 

U.S. District Judge James L. Robart in a Wednesday order consolidated cases brought by lead plaintiffs Alucard Taylor in September and Araba Armstrong in November. Judge Robart ordered the two law firms to serve as interim co-leads in a separate Thursday order.

 … 

The Premier Agent program allows participating agents and brokers to pay for or earn access to homebuyer inquiries on the Zillow website, according to Armstrong’s lawsuit. Through the Premier program, along with its Flex program, Zillow distributes leads to agents based on their referrals to the company’s home loan services. 

 …  

In the September case, Taylor, who lives in Portland, Oregon, claimed he was browsing on Zillow when he clicked a button to “contact agent.” Taylor believed he’d be connected with a listing agent for the property he was looking at. 

Instead, an agent affiliated with Zillow contacted him. Throughout the process of touring the home and the closing, Taylor said he never believed he had an option to use an agent other than the one provided by Zillow. In the end, the home seller could have paid less in commissions and set a lower purchase price, Taylor argued. 

 …  

The Taylor plaintiffs are represented by Jerrod C. Patterson and Steve W. Berman of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP and Douglas James McNamara of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC. 

Pesticide companies Syngenta and Corteva are facing damages claims of more than $1.2 billion and $883 million claim, respectively, according to class certification bids filed by farmers looking to represent the hundreds of thousands of pesticide buyers allegedly harmed by rebate programs that paid distributors to forgo cheaper generics.

…

“The central question—whether Syngenta engaged in anticompetitive conduct to exclude lower-priced generics—is common to all class members and can be proven with classwide evidence,” the farmers said in the Syngenta brief. “The evidence shows Syngenta executed an illegal, multi-year scheme with national distributors and retailers to foreclose generic entry and create a de facto monopoly for products containing at-issue [active ingredients].”

Like the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general have alleged in their suits, the farmers in the multidistrict litigation have alleged Corteva and Syngenta use loyalty programs to artificially extend their patent monopolies over certain pesticides by offering payments to distributors that agree to limit their sales of cheaper generic products.

…

In the certification bids first filed under seal last month, the farmers moved to name two classes against each pesticide company. One class would represent damage claims under the in-play state laws while the other would cover a nationwide class seeking injunctive relief.

…

The farmers are represented by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, Lowey Dannenberg PC, Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Korein Tillery LLC and Pinto Coates Kyre & Bowers PLLC.

After passage of new SEC rule, Zion Oil and Gas requires shareholders to resolve disputes through arbitration

An oil driller that uses biblical verses to guide exploration has become the first company to block class-action shareholder lawsuits under new management-friendly policies approved by US securities regulators.

Zion Oil and Gas, a penny stock that as of September had no revenue from drilling, said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last week that it would require shareholders to resolve disputes through arbitration rather than court.

The move comes after the SEC in September announced it would no longer block companies from public markets if they banned shareholders from filing class-action lawsuits. Critics of the change said they worried it would harm corporate disclosures and shareholder rights, putting investors and markets at risk.

. . .

Laura Posner, a partner at law firm Cohen Milstein, said: “I think we’ll see an uptick of fraud because companies won’t face the public onslaught that could occur when they are caught engaging in malfeasance.”

Posner said most companies are unlikely to adopt these provisions, but those with higher risk profiles may take advantage of them.

. . .

Posner said: “Not only do you have companies and their counsel advising that these proposals are not in their best interest, but you have every asset manager, investment adviser and large institutional investor saying these are not good for the company.”

Benjamin D. Brown of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC pushed the UFC to increase its settlement payout to “life-changing” sums for fighters accusing it of wage suppression, earning his place as one of the 2025 Law360 Competition MVPs.

His biggest accomplishment:

For Brown, the year’s achievements came down to the split screen view of his transition to Cohen Milstein managing partner, a role he took on last year, even as he stayed active in his various cases, including major ongoing litigation over real estate broker fee rules.

“Our firm is at the center of so many high-profile litigations that I think managing this firm is almost a full-time job,” Brown said.

But at the same time, “litigation is more than a full-time job. … And the only way to make it work is by trusting my partners here at the firm who stand by my side and take on a lot of the day-to-day operations and management of individual litigations,” he said. “I think that to do it successfully, you have to have a lot of trust, a lot of really good teamwork, and a culture of sharing responsibility and working closely together. So it’s been gratifying that I’ve been able to stay involved in all my cases, meaningfully involved in all my cases.”

His proudest moment:

Brown said he takes particular pride in the February final approval hearing in which a Nevada federal judge signed off on a $375 million settlement in a class action that has taken more than a decade to settle in which fighters accused UFC of suppressing their wages. U.S. District Judge Richard F. Boulware II had rejected a previous version of the deal, saying he wanted to see the fighters getting “life-changing” sums and sending the parties back to cobble together a more generous agreement.

Brown noted that Judge Boulware wanted to hear from the fighters themselves to ensure the amounts were appropriately meaningful, so Cohen Milstein and its co-counsel talked to a great number of the class members.

“We presented them with estimates of what their actual award would be if the settlement was approved, which it ultimately was. We showed them what they could expect, and we asked them what this money would mean to them,” he said.

The fighters responded with a range of things they could do with the money, including paying for medical bills, education and more, according to Brown.

“Fighter after fighter wrote declarations about how this money was going to help them and change their lives. And it’s a rare thing when you specialize in class actions to get down to that level of interviewing individual class members at the end of a successful case. And hearing how important those results are going to be,” he said. “It’s just incredibly gratifying. And certainly one of my proudest moments of the past year and my career to date.”

Why antitrust law:

Brown said he is an antitrust attorney because, at a “systemic level,” he likes thinking about things on economic lines and because he believes in his role that he says “helps police corporate overreach and misdeeds.” But there are also the individual moments where he gets “to see the positive impact that your cases are having on your clients.”

Law360 is pleased to announce the formation of its 2025 Editorial Advisory Boards.

The editorial advisory boards provide feedback on Law360’s coverage and expert insight on how best to shape future coverage.

The members of Law360’s 2025 Editorial Advisory Boards are:

Benefits: Dan Sutter, Partner, Cohen Milstein

Competition: Dan Silverman, Partner, Cohen Milstein

Consumer Protection: Eric Kafka, Partner, Cohen Milstein

Employment Authority Discrimination: Harini Srinivasan, Partner, Cohen Milstein

Employment Authority Wage & Hour: Rebecca Ojserkis, Associate, Cohen Milstein

A Virginia federal court has refused to toss a proposed class action accusing some of the country’s biggest warship makers and naval engineering consultants of participating in an illegal conspiracy to suppress wages after the Fourth Circuit revived the case earlier this year.

U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga issued an order Wednesday denying the remaining arguments for dismissal from the shipbuilders and consultants, which include General Dynamics, Huntington Ingalls Industries and CACI.

Judge Trenga initially tossed the antitrust claims on statute of limitations grounds, but a split Fourth Circuit panel revived the case in May.

The judge said in Wednesday’s order that while the companies contend they have independent reasons for not poaching naval engineers from each other, the proposed class is offering anonymous witness statements about an alleged “gentleman’s agreement,” along with allegations about the “incestuous” nature of the industry.

“These arguments are substantial, but at the motion to dismiss stage this court is not permitted to ‘weigh[] the competing inferences that can be drawn from the complaint,’ and when considered in light of all the allegations in the complaint … plaintiff has plausibly alleged sufficient ‘plus’ factors,” the order said.

The judge said the engineers are offering statements from multiple witnesses about the companies not recruiting naval engineers from each other and said the witnesses either name each company as part of the conspiracy or discuss their policy of not recruiting workers from competitors.

. . .

The plaintiffs are represented by Brent W. Johnson, Zachary R. Glubiak, Steven J. Toll, Robert W. Cobbs, Alison S. Deich and Sabrina S. Merold of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Shana E. Scarlett, Steve W. Berman and Elaine T. Byszewski of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, George F. Farah, Rebecca P. Chang, Nicholas Jackson and Simon Wiener of Handley Farah & Anderson PLLC, Candice J. Enders and Julia R. McGrath of Berger Montague and Brian D. Clark, Arielle S. Wagner and Stephen J. Teti of Lockridge Grindal Nauen PLLP.