Consumer Class Action Defense

Mandell Menkes has a very active class action defense practice. Our experience includes the defense of numerous class actions in state and federal courts in Illinois, and throughout the United States. Many of these class actions have involved claims under various states’ consumer fraud and deceptive business practices statutes, and claims under other state and federal consumer protection laws, including the Truth in Lending Act and the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. These class actions have collectively alleged classes of Illinois, multi-state and nationwide consumers.

 

Our clients have included consumer finance companies, nationwide private label credit card issuers, banks, record labels, insurers, hospitals, nationwide debt collection agencies and other kinds of businesses.

 

Our firm has pioneered several innovative techniques which have enabled us to defeat certification or achieve advantageous settlements. These techniques have included asserting class-wide set-offs, disqualifying class representatives whose claims may be antagonistic to the claims of others in the defined class, procuring the dismissal of class actions brought by Chapter 7 debtors by purchasing the cause of action from the bankruptcy trustee, and using competing class actions to gain the best settlement for our clients. For example, one of our attorneys represented a client in defense of over 20 related consumer class actions in various state and federal jurisdictions throughout the United States, negotiated a very favorable settlement on a nationwide basis with one group of plaintiffs’ class action attorneys in the most favorable jurisdiction, obtained court approval of the settlement of the nationwide class action in that jurisdiction over the objections of plaintiffs’ class action attorneys who had cases pending in their jurisdictions, and successfully defended the trial court’s approval of the settlement in the appellate court.