Howard Erichson was quoted in a Bloomberg Law article about a consumer class-action case involving Home Depot USA Inc.
Defense attorneys called the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the Home Depot case “welcome news” because it highlights yet another procedural strategy used by plaintiffs’ attorneys to try and avoid having their suits moved to federal court.
“This is a loophole that plaintiffs’ lawyers seek to exploit with some frequency: Plaintiffs’ lawyers routinely identify consumers who are sued in ordinary debt-collection proceedings in state court in order to bring class action lawsuits against a third-party company,” Archis Parasharami, partner at Mayer Brown in Washington, told Bloomberg Law.
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The procedural posture of having class claims asserted against third-party defendants may not happen very often, but, the issue is still enough to get civil procedural wonks excited.“It makes for a really interesting question of statutory interpretation and a test of a potential strategy for consumers to keep certain class actions in state court despite CAFA,” Howard Erichson, who studies complex litigation at Fordham University School of Law in New York, told Bloomberg Law.