Plaintiffs’ lawyers across the land have trumpeted the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Spokeo as a victory (or at least not a loss). Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 136 S. Ct. 1540 (2016). At least one plaintiff’s lawyer has gone so far as to suggest that defense lawyers who raise Spokeo-based arguments should fear sanctions. As a Southern colleague of mine would say, those lawyers are trying to make a silk purse of a sow’s ear.
Although many post-Spokeo decisions have not yielded dismissal, many have, and they have done so based largely on Spokeo, which does more than reaffirm prior notions of standing and rather strengthens them in a way that is quite beneficial to corporate defendants facing trumped-up claims with no real harm. One of the most recent defense victories post-Spokeo is Meyers v. Nicolet Rest. of De Pere, LLC, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 22139 (7th Cir. Dec. 13, 2016).
Continue Reading Spokeo Was a Loss for Plaintiffs, Seventh Circuit Reaffirms
A relatively new breed of data breach class action involves financial institutions suing merchants for expenses associated with credit card data breaches. Although merchants may not have contractual privity with the card issuers (and instead may have contractual privity with the credit card brands or payment processors), the financial institutions in these cases claim that the retailers should still compensate the financial institutions for costs associated with fraudulent charges and reissuance of credit cards as a result of a data breach. In the most recent decision involving these sorts of claims, an Illinois federal judge found the financial institutions’ claims against the Shnucks grocery store chain too vague to survive Rule 12 dismissal. See Cmty. Bank of Trenton v. Schnuck Mkts., 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 133482 (S.D. Ill. Sept. 28, 2016). The court reasoned that although “the parties are charting relatively new territory in the data breach context by presenting a case between financial institutions and a merchant (as opposed to customers and a merchant), . . . the Court notes that the generality made it difficult to assess the plausibility of such claims.” Id. at *8-9.
