Two Massachusetts renters and an advocacy group asked a federal judge not to dismiss their lawsuit against SafeRent Solutions LLC, saying they can prove the company’s scoring tool disproportionately denies housing to people of color by using credit scores.
Nancy Louis and Monica Douglas, along with Community Action Agency of Somerville Inc., told Judge Angel Kelley on Monday to deny SafeRent’s motion to dismiss the case for failure to state a claim and lack of jurisdiction. Louis and Douglas said their discrimination complaint clearly shows the company is in violation of both state and federal fair housing laws by creating an unnecessary barrier to accessing housing.
“[R]elying on such data in scoring potential tenants disproportionately impacts Black and Hispanic tenants, and those with low income, like those who use housing vouchers,” Louis and Douglas said in the memorandum filed Monday. “Black, Hispanic and low-income individuals all have lower credit scores and worse credit history compared to white individuals. That means that SafeRent assigns these groups disproportionately lower scores than white applicants, which, in turn, causes the disproportionate denial of housing.”
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The plaintiffs are represented by Todd S. Kaplan and Nadine Cohen of Greater Boston Legal Services, Christine E. Webber and Samantha N. Gerleman of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, and Stuart T. Rossman, Charles M. Delbaum and Ariel C. Nelson of the National Consumer Law Center.
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Pharmaceutical giant Janssen is refusing to comply with previous orders for discovery, impeding the progress of a suit alleging that it paid kickbacks to doctors to boost sales of certain drugs, attorneys for a relator told a Massachusetts federal judge Thursday.
In a memorandum to U.S. District Chief Judge F. Dennis Saylor, relator Julie Long said Janssen had not complied with previous orders to produce answers about its affirmative defenses in the False Claims Act case, several “discrete categories of highly relevant documents” that were supposed to be turned over three months ago, as were all documents being withheld under a claim of privilege.
“The company’s stonewalling and evasiveness are stymieing progress, including delaying the creation of the court-ordered plan for searching for and producing relevant documents from current and former employees who had significant involvement,” the memorandum said. “Janssen cannot be permitted to continue ignoring the court’s orders and the federal rules.”
The 120-page qui tam action was first filed in 2016. It alleged that beginning around 2003, Janssen provided a “wide variety of practice management and infusion suite operational support and consulting services and related programs” to some rheumatology and gastroenterology practices. The services were said to have helped the doctors open in-office infusion suites and induce them to prescribe and infuse Janssen’s rheumatoid arthritis drugs Remicade and Simponi ARIA.
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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.
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Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC will receive $4.25 million of a $6.25 million global settlement they brokered on behalf of investors in aircraft company Boeing who accused the company’s brass of concealing issues with its 737 Max jet, an Illinois federal judge said.
In the order, U.S. District Judge Harry D. Leinenweber said the legal team representing lead plaintiff Seafarers Pension Plan in derivative litigation against Boeing could have their requested seven-figure fee and expense award, calling the sum “fair and reasonable.” He also granted the pension plan’s request for a $15,000 service award.
The legal team requested the sum in November, telling Judge Leinenweber that the global settlement included claims that had been “vigorously contested” in Illinois, in Delaware and before the Seventh Circuit.
They added that the proposed settlement agreement also contained “valuable corporate governance benefits” that include the company revising its bylaws to allow Boeing investors to bring derivative claims in federal courts in both Delaware and the Eastern District of Virginia, where Boeing is now headquartered.
A Florida federal judge ruled Thursday that banana grower Chiquita Brands International Inc. need not face certain claims over its financial support for a defunct Colombian paramilitary group, finding no evidence that the relatives of some plaintiffs were killed by that organization.
The decision, which U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra issued in a 105-page order, terminates seven bellwether suits Chiquita was facing in multidistrict litigation over its support for Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, a right-wing group accused of killing thousands of people.
Judge Marra’s ruling also allows 10 other bellwether cases to proceed to trial after he identified enough evidence that the plaintiffs’ relatives were killed or disappeared by the AUC during armed conflict in Colombia in the 1990s and early 2000s. Those plaintiffs, the judge said, have at least presented a “triable issue” on the existence of an AUC link to their family members’ eventual fates.
The Thursday decision added to a flurry of recent activity in the long-running MDL, which seeks to hold Chiquita liable for hundreds of AUC-linked deaths or disappearances due to the company’s financial support for the paramilitary group, which amounted to more than $1.7 million.
Earlier this year, the Eleventh Circuit revived 12 cases Judge Marra dismissed in 2019, out of an initial batch of 50 bellwether lawsuits. In its Sept. 6 ruling, the appeals court found the judge had wrongly rejected some of the plaintiffs’ evidence that the AUC was responsible for the deaths of their relatives.
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The plaintiffs are represented separately by Paul Wolf, Jack Scarola of Searcy Denney Scarola Barnhart & Shipley PA, James K. Green of James K. Green PA, Richard Herz, Marco Simons, Marissa Vahlsing and Sean Powers of EarthRights International, John de Leon of the Law Offices of Chavez & De Leon PA, Agnieszka M. Fryszman of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Paul L. Hoffman of Schonbrun DeSimone Seplow Harris & Hoffman LLP, Judith Brown Chomsky of the Law Offices of Judith Brown Chomsky, Arturo Carrillo of the Colombian Institute of International Law, Jonathan C. Reiter of the Law Firm of Jonathan C. Reiter, and by Ronald Guralnick of Ronald Guralnick PA.
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A New York federal judge refused to send to arbitration a suit claiming Argent Trust let a barbecue chain’s employee stock ownership plan overpay for company shares, ruling Tuesday that the plan’s arbitration agreement is unenforceable because it denies rights afforded under federal benefits law.
U.S. District Judge Denise L. Cote said Jamaal Lloyd and Anastasia Jenkins are not obligated to arbitrate their claims brought under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act against Argent, the trustee of W BBQ Holdings Inc.’s ESOP, after finding that the agreement prevents employees from seeking relief that federal benefits law provides.
“The plaintiffs are correct; the plan’s arbitration clause may not be enforced,” Judge Cote said. “The plan’s arbitration procedures prohibit representative actions seeking relief on behalf of a plan even though ERISA expressly provides for such actions.”
Lloyd sued Argent and several of the barbecue chain’s shareholders in May, alleging its workers lost millions of dollars in retirement savings when shareholders sold 400,000 shares of common stock to the ESOP in July 2019 at above fair market value. The shares were sold for $99 million, but by the end of 2016, the value of the shares plummeted to $28.9 million, Lloyd and Jenkins said.
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Lloyd and Jenkins are represented by Michelle C. Yau, Kai H. Richter, Daniel R. Sutter, Ryan A. Wheeler and Michael Eisenkraft of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.
A D.C. Circuit panel seemed disinclined Wednesday to say former President Donald Trump has absolute immunity for his Jan. 6, 2021, rally speech given the “colorable case of incitement” at issue, but wrestled with how to structure a limit on presidential immunity.
During a nearly two-hour oral argument, U.S. Circuit Judge Gregory Katsas said several times that the hard thing about the case for him is there being at least a “colorable case of incitement” in the then-president’s Jan. 6 speech before his supporters attacked the Capitol. In a consolidated appeal of three cases brought by Democratic lawmakers and two U.S. Capitol police officers seeking to hold Trump liable for psychological or physical harm they suffered from the Capitol attack, Trump is arguing a D.C. district judge wrongly denied him presidential immunity.
Judge Katsas challenged Trump’s attorney to explain any functional or historical support for immunizing the president against actual incitement of rioting or lawless acts, and said he does not think there would be broad impacts on the office of the presidency if immunity is denied here.
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U.S. Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan asked Joseph Sellers of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, who argued for the plaintiffs, to give the court direction on what standard to use when determining whether presidents lose their immunity. Sellers said the test should be whether a complaint plausibly alleges the president took action that “disrupted or blocked the discharge of duties by a co-equal branch of government” — as he says happened here when Trump supporters interrupted the Congressional count of electoral college ballots.
Judge Katsas suggested such a test may clash with First Amendment speech protections, saying it would “seem odd to me to say a president would lose immunity for inciting activity where a private party would have a substantive defense under Brandenburg.”
“To me, that’s where the rubber meets the road,” the judge added.
He said he has printed out Trump’s speech from the rally and read it a number of times. The worst parts of the speech — lines like Trump telling his supporters to “fight like hell”— don’t compare to more explicit statements other courts have determined are incitement, he said.
Sellers said the speech cannot be viewed in a vacuum but must be considered in context with the months Trump spent sowing disbelief about the 2020 election results and riling up his supporters to believe the election had been stolen — what Judge Katsas said can be summed up as the “powder keg.”
Sellers argued that, even if no single set of words spoken by Trump is tantamount to the Brandenburg cases, the whole of the circumstances makes clear the president ignited the situation.
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The plaintiffs are represented by Joseph M. Sellers, Brian Corman and Alison S. Deich of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Janette McCarthy-Wallace, Anthony P. Ashton and Anna Kathryn Barnes of the NAACP, Robert B. McDuff of Mississippi Center for Justice, Patrick A. Malone, Daniel Scialpi and Heather J. Kelly of Patrick Malone & Associates PC, Phillip Andonian and Joseph Caleb of Caleb Andonian PLLC, Matthew Kaiser and Sarah R. Fink of Kaiser Dillon PLLC, and Cameron Kistler, Erica Newland, Kristy L. Parker, Jacek Pruski, Anne Tindall, John Paredes, Genevieve C. Nadeau, Benjamin L. Berwick and Helen E. White of United To Protect Democracy.
Law360 Pulse Prestige Leaders report has named Cohen Milstein to its annual industry “Prestige Leader” list, recognizing the top 100 law firms most-well regarded by the Law360 editorial team. Notably, Cohen Milstein is only one of two plaintiffs law firms named to the list.
The Law360 Pulse editorial team compiles data from Law360 surveys, proprietary awards and the LexisNexis suite of research tools to measure four equally weighted key indicators of prestige.
Law360 criteria includes: financial performance, which looks at profits per partner and revenue per lawyer (for firms that do not disclose such information, such as Cohen Milstein, this data is assessed via reported settlements and other measurable data that is in the public domain); desirability, which measures how frequently firms were named by law students and attorneys as their top choice firms for work; editorial awards, or the number of Law360 awards a firm has captured over the past year; and news sentiment — the number of positive stories about the firm that appear in more than 20 respected legal publications.
Read more about report on Law360 Pulse.
CHICAGO– Today, the City of Chicago announces that Uber has agreed to a settlement stemming from the City’s investigation into UberEats’ and Postmates’ practices of listing Chicago restaurants on their platforms without the restaurants’ consent, being in violation of the City’s emergency fee cap ordinance, and other advertising-related conduct. The City acknowledges Uber’s cooperation in bringing this investigation to closure.
“Today’s settlement reflects the City’s commitment to creating a fair and honest marketplace that protects both consumers and businesses from unlawful conduct,” said Mayor Lightfoot. “Chicago’s restaurant owners and workers work diligently to build their reputations and serve our residents and visitors. That’s why our hospitality industry is so critical to our economy, and it only works when there is transparency and fair pricing. There is no room for deceptive and unfair practices.”
Under the settlement terms:
- In September 2021, in response to the City’s discovery of unlawful conduct, Uber quickly repaid $3,331,892 to Chicago restaurants that had been charged commissions exceeding 15%, in violation of the City’s emergency fee cap ordinance.
- Uber will pay an additional $2,250,000 to Chicago restaurants that were charged commissions in excess of the limits set by the City’s emergency fee cap.
- After reaching out to Uber in 2021, the company removed all remaining Chicago restaurants that had been listed on Uber’s platforms without consent and agreed not to list Chicago restaurants without consent in the future.
- Uber will pay $500,000 to Chicago restaurants that Uber listed on its meal delivery platforms without consent and that do not currently contract with Uber.
- Uber will provide $2,500,000 in commission waivers to Chicago restaurants that were listed on Uber’s platforms without consent and that do not currently contract with Uber.
- Uber will pay $1,500,000 to the City to cover the costs and fees of its investigation.
“We delivered on our commitment to protect consumers and businesses,” said Kenneth J. Meyer, Commissioner, Chicago Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection. “The settlement is the result of the City acting swiftly and holding companies accountable for deceitful practices.”
“We welcome any relief provided to the independent restaurants that struggled throughout the pandemic and continue to shoulder the rising costs of doing business,” said Sam Toia, President and CEO, Illinois Restaurant Association. “No third party delivery company should be listing restaurants without their consent and all third party companies should have been following the emergency cap imposed during the pandemic. Our restaurants will receive immediate benefit from this settlement.”
Restaurants previously listed on Uber’s platforms without consent should visit Chicago.gov/UberSettlement and follow the instructions to receive financial relief and commission waivers. Restaurants that were charged commissions in excess of the fee cap in 2021 will receive payment automatically from Uber.
A link to the complete Settlement Agreement can be found at Chicago.gov/UberSettlement.
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The City of Chicago has reached a $10 million settlement with Uber Technologies Inc. stemming from allegations that Uber Eats and Postmates listed restaurants on their platforms without consent, and that restaurants were charged more than legally allowed.
Uber, which owns Postmates, and Chicago reached the deal after a two-year investigation by the city, the mayor’s office announced Monday. Chicago put in place an emergency 15% delivery-fee cap related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and is suing other delivery-app companies for not living up to that law and other local rules meant to protect restaurants and consumers.
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Chicago sued Uber competitors DoorDash Inc. and Grubhub last year, alleging deceptive fees and predatory practices that include behavior similar to some of the allegations against Uber. For example, the lawsuits allege that the companies cause problems for nonpartner restaurants when they scrape information about them online and don’t verify their accuracy. The lawsuit against DoorDash is in the discovery process, while there will be a hearing in the suit against Grubhub next week, according to Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, the law firm working with the city on the case.
Read Uber Agrees to Pay $10 Million for Listing Chicago Restaurants Without Their Consent.
In a new lawsuit, Northwest Biotherapeutics accuses market makers of illicit ‘spoofing’ trades
A biotechnology company accused Citadel Securities LLC, Susquehanna International Group LLP and other Wall Street firms of driving down its stock price through a series of illicit trades.
In a lawsuit filed Thursday in Manhattan federal court, Northwest Biotherapeutics Inc. alleged the market makers had repeatedly engaged in “spoofing,” where traders place orders with an intent to fool other investors about a stock’s demand and manipulate the price.
Northwest, whose shares trade over the counter, also sued Canaccord Genuity Inc. G1 Execution Services LLC, GTS Securities LLC, Instinet LLC, Lime Trading Corp. and Virtu Americas LLC.
Spokesmen for Citadel and Virtu didn’t immediately comment. The other firms didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Spoofing, which was outlawed in 2010, has been at the center of a yearslong campaign by U.S. authorities to root out market manipulation. In August, a federal jury in Chicago convicted two former JPMorgan Chase & Co. traders who had been charged with spoofing in the gold market.
In the modern stock market, high-speed trading firms like Citadel and Susquehanna provide stock quotes throughout the day, executing orders from other investors while collecting a thin spread between the buying and selling price of the shares.
It’s unclear from the data cited in the suit whether the alleged spoofing trades were placed on behalf of other investors, or by the firms themselves.
But Northwest argued that these market makers knew it was unlawful to execute the alleged trades and should have had procedures in place to detect and prevent them.
The market makers, Northwest wrote, “deliberately engaged in repeated spoofing that interfered with the natural forces of supply and demand and drove (the company’s) share price downward over the course of the relevant period.”
Northwest said the alleged spoofing trades, which occurred between December 2017 and August 2022, battered the stock price even as the company released positive results from the trial of its lead product, a brain cancer treatment. In its suit, the company wrote that it had sold more than 49 million shares to raise money “at artificially depressed prices.”
“One of the tell-tale signs of a manipulative spoofer is a rapid reversal of trading direction — a lot of sell orders, followed by buy orders, followed by the cancellation of sell orders — which suggest the original sell orders were not intended to be executed, but were merely a ploy to drive the price down to `buy low,’” Northwest said in its complaint.
The company said it found thousands of spoofing episodes involving tens of millions of “baiting orders” over a five-year span, and was able to identify the market participants using trading data.