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Typically Uncommon: Defending Class Action Certification in Data Breach Litigation

By Brian E. Middlebrook, Tyrik Jiang, John T. Mills and Joseph Salvo
January 01, 2023

The most common questions and key elements of a negligence claim are whether the defendant breached a duty of care, whether there is any injury as a result of the defendant's breach of any purported duty of care, and whether the defendant's alleged breach caused the plaintiff any damages. While these essential questions and elements apply with equal force in data breach litigation involving as few as two parties and as many as thousands in the form of class action litigation, the difficult question to answer in these cases is "what is the value, if any, of your injury or damages?"

These questions have flooded the courts in the context of data breach class action litigation, resulting in contradicting decisions among the state and federal courts across the country as to whether a prospect of future identity theft or financial harm is sufficient to confer standing and allow a plaintiff, whether individually or on behalf of a putative class, to bring suit against a defendant who might have been the victim of a data breach, or whether it is sufficient to allege legally cognizable damages to sustain a claim for negligence or another common law or statutory claim.

To further add to the complexity in defending data breach litigation, the influx of data breach class action litigation has highlighted another critical question — has a plaintiff met the requirements under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 to bring suit on behalf of themselves and a putative class? In data breach class action litigation, this determination typically turns on whether the plaintiff and the members of the putative class have demonstrated the requirements of commonality and typicality, and the related, yet more demanding, requirement of predominance.

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