Does a trial court have to approve a voluntary dismissal of a putative class action before the case gets to class certification? While the precise answer remains uncertain, the Fourth Circuit, North Carolina courts, and other jurisdictions have made room for a Rule 23(e)-adjacent—or, Rule 23(e) “light”—approach for handling voluntary, […]
2022 was, in our estimation, a good year, including for class-action practice in North Carolina’s courts. All in all, 2022 gave us one important opinion from the North Carolina Supreme Court concerning Rule 23 as well as several court of appeals opinions concerning issues important to class-action practice, such as […]
Attorneys interested in class actions and antitrust law will read the Ninth Circuit’s recent opinion in the “tuna case”—Olean Wholesale Grocery Cooperative, Inc. v. Bumble Bee Foods LLC—with relish. 31 F.4th 651 (2022). The case contains important takeaways for class action and antitrust attorneys,[1] and also—the focus of this post—highlights […]
In last fall’s television sensation, Squid Game, unwilling participants in a gruesome game show compete in a series of deceptively simple challenges where one wrong move can have lethal consequences. The penultimate challenge is to cross a bridge made up of pairs of glass panes. In each pair, one pane […]