Articles Posted in Best Business And Class Action Lawyers Near Chicago

Judge Certifies Nationwide Class in Lawsuit against Abercrombie & Fitch
A nationwide class has been certified in a lawsuit against Abercrombie & Fitch for allegedly voiding gift cards issued to customers as part of a 2009 winter holiday promotion despite the fact that the gift cards stated “No Expiration Date.” Class counsel, Lubin Austermuehle, P.C. and Schad, Diamond & Shedden, P.C., has created a website http://www.abercrombieclassaction.com where potential class members can obtain more information and review important documents and dates.

A nationwide class has been certified in a lawsuit against Abercrombie & Fitch for allegedly voiding gift cards issued to customers as part of a 2009 winter holiday promotion despite the fact that the gift cards stated “No Expiration Date.”
Chicago, IL (PRWEB) May 24, 2013
A judge in the Northern District of Illinois has certified a nationwide class in a class action lawsuit filed against Abercrombie & Fitch (case no.10-cv-04866). The lawsuit, filed by Tiffany Boundas through her attorneys Lubin Austermuehle, P.C. and Schad, Diamond & Shedden, P.C., alleges that Abercrombie and abercrombie kids issued $25 gift cards to customers as part of a 2009 in-store winter holiday promotion. Abercrombie then voided the gift cards a couple months later despite language on the cards that stated “No Expiration Date.” By doing so, the lawsuit contends, Abercrombie breached its contracts with customers. The lawsuit seeks a payment of the value of the gift cards that customers could not redeem as a result of Abercrombie’s actions. Abercrombie contends that more than $5 million is at issue in this lawsuit.

Copies of the Complaint, the judge’s opinion certifying the class, and the Class Notice can be obtained by going to http://www.abercrombieclassaction.com.

The judge has set a July 20, 2013 deadline for class members to exclude themselves from the class. For more information and to learn other important dates in this case, please visit http://www.abercrombieclassaction.com.

Lubin Austermuehle, P.C. is a law firm committed to fighting for consumer’s rights. With over two and a half decades of experience litigating class action lawsuits across the nation, the attorneys at Lubin Austermuehle, P.C. have recovered millions of dollars for consumers. Lubin Austermuehle, P.C. has offices in downtown Chicago and throughout the Chicagoland area. To learn more about Lubin Austermuehle, P.C. or to contact one of its attorneys please visit https://www.chicagobusinesslawfirm.com.

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With all the spam that companies tend to send out, it’s no wonder that most people carefully guard their telephone numbers. Many people, however, don’t think of the fact that they are giving their number to every person and company that they call or send text messages to. In a recent class-action lawsuit against MTV’s parent company, Viacom, plaintiffs allege that the company violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by sending promotional texts to people who voted in the 2011 Video Music Awards.

The lead plaintiff in the case, Erin Mock, voted in the 2011 Video Music Awards via text message and was allegedly bombarded with promotional text messages shortly thereafter. According to the lawsuit, one such message read “MTV: ‘Jersey Shore’ sneak peek of tonight’s episode – why is Snooki lying in a bush? Watch”. Another said, “MTV: ‘Real World San Diego’ premieres Wednesday, Sept. 28 at 10/9c”.

The lawsuit alleges that, during the VMA solicitation for votes, viewers were never warned that, by voting, “they would be consenting to receipt of future text SPAM advertisements from Defendant and/or its subsidiaries and/or employees and/or agents”.

Mock further alleges that she sent a text message asking to stop receiving these text advertisements. She received a confirmation that the text messages would stop, but she allegedly received another such message (this one with a link to a “Real World” trailer) after she received her confirmation.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Tennessee, alleges that the “Plaintiff and the members of the Class and Sub-Class have all suffered irreparable harm as a result of the Defendant’s unlawful and wrongful conduct”. The suit is seeking $1,500 per alleged violation for each member of the class, as well as an injunctive relief against such conduct in the future.

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Once a subscriber gives a company their credit/debit card or bank information to charge subscription fees, some companies will take advantage of that to raise their fees without notifying their subscribers. Such is allegedly the case with the Chicago Tribune.
Cheryl Naedler and Theodore Raab, two Tribune subscribers, filed a class-action lawsuit against the company in the Circuit Court of Cook County. The lawsuit alleges that the Chicago Tribune breached its contract with subscribers and violated the Illinois Consumer Fraud Act by charging an inflated subscription fee, without warning subscribers at least 30 days in advance of the change.

According to the class counsel, what the Chicago Tribune should have done, “is send notice at least one billing cycle in advance saying we’re going to increase it … if you agree to pay. And they didn’t do it.”

Our Chicago class action lawyers note that the Chicago Tribune recently began mailing out a proposed offer to settle the lawsuit. Although the company denies the allegations, it said that it reached the settlement to, “avoid the cost, risk, and delay of litigation and uncertainty of trial” according to the notice.

If the court approves the settlement, about 41,000 subscribers will receive $6.50 each as part of the settlement. Naedler and Raab, as the class representatives, will receive $2,000 each.

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Many people are on the look-out for a quick fix to lose weight and get in shape. It is therefore no surprise that hundreds of thousands of people took advantage of Skechers’s offer when they introduced shoes that claimed to help people lose weight and tone up.

Skechers’s ads featured celebrity endorsers such as Kim Kardashian and Brooke Burke. The shoe company claimed that its Shape-Ups were designed to promote weight loss and tone butt, leg, and stomach muscles with the shoe’s curved “rocker” or rolling bottom. Skechers said that this caused instability which would cause the wearer of the shoes to “use more energy with every step.” Shape-ups cost about $100 and are sold across the country.

The Resistance Runner shoes were advertised as a fitness tool that could help people who wore them increase “muscle activation” by up to 85% for posture-related muscles and 71% for muscles in the buttocks.

The current lawsuit against Skechers consolidates more than 70 lawsuits from across the country into one lawsuit in federal court in Louisville, Kentucky. U.S. District Judge Thomas B. Russell recently approved the settlement reached between Skechers and the plaintiffs for $40 million. The judge also ordered Skechers to pay an additional $5 million for the attorneys in the case to share. Russell ordered that the money cannot come out of the $40 million settlement.
The two lead plaintiffs in the case will receive payments of $2,500 each.

Those with approved claims will be able to collect repayment for their purchase – up to $80 per pair of Shape-Ups; $84 per pair of Resistance Runners; up to $54 per pair of Podded Sole Shoes; and $40 per pair of Tone-Ups. The settlement covers more than 520,000 claims. About 1,000 people who are eligible for coverage by the settlement opted out.

Eleven objections to the settlement were filed, including people seeking the full purchase price of their shoes and one person saying the settlement would prevent him from seeking damages on his own. The judge rejected all of these arguments.

The settlement comes just one year after Skechers reached a deal with the Federal Trade Commission regarding the ads. A settlement with the Federal Trade Commission bars Skechers from ever again running the ads. If there is any money left over from the $40 million after all of the claims have been processed, the judge has ordered that the remainder of the money is to go to the Federal Trade Commission.

Skechers denies the allegations but said that it is settling in order to avoid a long and costly litigation.

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While copyright attorneys are very useful in protecting the rights of citizens, there are those who allegedly use illegal means to take advantage of copyright laws, as well as the high cost of litigation.

Three attorneys, Paul Hansmeier, John Steele, and Paul Duffy allegedly set up a copyright-trolling operation which came to be known as Prenda Law. The attorneys at Prenda Law allegedly forged copyright documents to give themselves the right to sue those who illegally downloaded pornography. They would then search the IP address of those who illegally downloaded the porn and sue. Before going to trail however, Prenda Law would offer the defendant a settlement of about $4,000, just below what a bare-bones defense in court would cost. To avoid the expense of litigation, and the embarrassment of having their names associated with a public trial involving pornography, the defendants allegedly were, more often than not, willing to pay the settlement.

In order to pull off this alleged scheme, the attorneys would file early-discovery requests with the courts so they could settle. Once they came upon a determined defendant though, Prenda allegedly quickly backed off. U.S. District Judge Otis Wright notes that, “Without better technology, prosecuting illegal BitTorrent activity requires substantial effort in order to make a case. … It is simply not economical viable to properly prosecute the illegal download of a single copyrighted video.”

Instead of admitting to the existence of other possibilities (for example, an outsider using a home WiFi signal), Wright says that Brett Gibbs, an attorney who worked for Prenda Law who is now testifying against Prenda, deliberately downplayed them. In one case, Gibbs described the defendant’s property as “a very large estate consisting of a gate for entry and multiple separate houses/structures on the property.” A quick search using Google Street View though, showed a very different picture: a modest home in West Covina, a Los Angeles suburb. Wright says, “It is a small house in a closely packed residential neighborhood, … There are also no gates visible. Gibbs’s statement is a blatant lie.”

At the hearing, the attorneys behind Prenda took the Fifth Amendment. They refused to answer such simple questions as who owned their shell companies and where the settlement money (rumored to be in the millions) was going.

The judge ordered the three Prenda attorneys to pay sanctions to defense attorneys of $36,150 to Morgan Pietz and $1,950 to Nicholas Ranallo. Wright then doubled that amount “as a punitive measure” for a total of $81,319.72. The judge says in a footnote that the total “is calculated to be just below the cost of an effective appeal”. The Prenda attorneys have 14 days to pay the sanctions.

Wright is also suggesting that the attorneys be disbarred. He states that, “there is little doubt that Steele, Hansmeier, Duffy [and] Gibbs suffer from a form of moral turpitude unbecoming an officer of the court.” In many states, California included, crimes reaching the level of “moral turpitude” lead to automatic disbarment. Wright says that he will be referring the four lawyers to every state bar in which they are currently admitted to practice.

Additionally, the judge has suggested that the alleged Prenda scheme warrants criminal investigation. In his conclusion, Wright says, “The Court will refer this matter to the United States Attorney for the Central District of California. The [court] will also refer this matter to the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service and will notify all judges before whom these attorneys have pending cases.”

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Our client David Bates created various web pages, YouTube videos and a Facebook page devoted to criticizing a local used car dealer that advertises extensively on the internet. The dealer sued Mr. Bates. Before our firm formally appeared, the dealership obtained a temporary restraining order restraining Mr. Bates from accusing the dealer of engaging in false advertising. Shortly after we appeared, we filed briefs arguing that Mr. Bates had a First Amendment right to criticize the dealer. We then obtained discovery proving that the dealer had filed a false affidavit to obtain the temporary restraining order because it had in fact engaged in false advertising in the past. We sought sanctions and the Federal Court entered a rule to show cause as to why the dealer shouldn’t be sanctioned for filing a false affidavit. A copy of that rule to show cause order can be seen by clicking here. A copy of our brief opposing entry of a prior restraint on Mr. Bate’s speech which we asserted would violate his First Amendment rights can be seen here. A copy of our sanctions brief can be seen here.

Following entry of the rule to show cause order, the case settled with the dealer providing Mr. Bates with a full release. The parties then headed to binding arbitration to decide if any of Mr. Bates’s videos were defamatory and thus should be removed from YouTube.

The Arbitrator ruled that none of the videos need to be removed as removing them would violate Mr. Bate’s First Amendment Rights. A copy of the brief we filed on behalf of Mr. Bates in the Arbitration can be viewed here. A copy of the Arbitrator’s decision ruling that none of of Mr. Bates’s videos were defamatory can be seen here.

With this decision, Mr. Bates has obtained a full release of all charges leveled against him and none of his material on the internet was censored. The Arbitrator ruled that minor errors in Mr. Bates’s videos do not make them defamatory because they are otherwise substantially accurate. The Arbitrator also ruled that the dealer failed to prove that its reputation had been harmed by Mr. Bates’s videos.

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Chicago has long been known for its corrupt politicians. A former executive of the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority (ISFA) claims that the IFSA is no exception in a recent lawsuit. The Authority denies those allegations.

Perri Imer, the former executive director of the ISFA, has filed a lawsuit against former Illinois governor Jim Thompson and the White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf. The lawsuit alleges that the two conspired to have Imer fired two years ago to stop her reforms at the public agency from going through. The complaint alleges that Reinsdorf and Thompson, who was chairman of the ISFA at the time, “sought to silence Perri Imer and to stifle her efforts to protect Illinois taxpayers from Reinsdorf’s greed.”

According to the lawsuit, Reinsdorf allegedly pressured Thompson to remove Imer because of her success in getting the White Sox to pay $1.2 million in yearly rent to the agency for the use of U.S. Cellular Field. According to the lawsuit, Reinsdorf allegedly had “undue influence” over former Governor Thompson and apparently over all the members of the ISFA Board of Directors who became complicit in allowing Reinsdorf to treat Cellular Field and the surrounding publicly owned lands as his personal fiefdom.”

According to the complaint, the public agency used taxpayer money to build and renovate U.S. Cellular Field as well as to build the restaurant next door, Bacardi at the Park. However, most of the revenue from those two facilities has allegedly gone to the White Sox.

The lawsuit alleges that the “highly favorable terms granted to the White Sox in 1998 and intended to last until at least 2029 served to create a sense of entitlement on the part of White Sox Chairman Reinsdorf, who has repeatedly acted as though U.S. Cellular Field was a gift by the Illinois taxpayers to Reinsdorf and his team”.

Thompson dismissed the lawsuit as a “self-serving tirade” and both he and a Reinsdorf spokesman denied the allegations.

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While many consider an oral agreement to be as binding as a legal contract, not everyone chooses to see it that way. Bruton Smith, owner of Speedway Motors Inc. (SMI) and Charlotte Motor Speedway, discovered this for himself regarding an agreement he made with Cabarrus County in North Carolina.

According to the lawsuit, Smith agreed to build a drag strip and make more than $200 million in upgrades to the Charlotte Motor Speedway. In return, Concord and Cabarrus county officials offered $80 million in tax breaks. The deal was announced in November 2007 but was never put into writing until the day after the zMax Dragway officially opened in August 2008, three weeks before its first scheduled race.

The contract stipulated that SMI was to spend its millions in infrastructure improvements within three years, but would be reimbursed through property tax breaks as improvements increased the value of the drag strip. Smith rejected the contract and SMI and Charlotte Motor Speedway sued the city in September 2009. Concord was dropped from the case after agreeing to pay $2.8 million and getting land easements. It is a common method used by North Carolina governments to encourage company investment.

SMI’s lawyers allege that local officials made a verbal promise in 2007 to provide $80 million in no more than six years. They also allege that the county had a financial motive and therefore cannot defend itself with a local law which protects municipalities from lawsuits.
Lawyers for Cabarrus County on the other hand, claim that the 2007 agreement was “an agreement to agree, which is not an agreement at all”. They also said that the fact that SMI built the drag strip and made other improvements before the deal was finalized is not the fault of the county.

The county’s lawyers further declare that it would be difficult for the county to come up with $80 million quickly because it is permitted to collect no more than $104 million in property taxes each year. According to the lawyers, that information is public knowledge and so SMI cannot claim that it was blindsided.

The dispute began when Smith gave the orders for workers to start grazing land on speedway property for the $60 million drag strip 20 miles north of Charlotte before obtaining the requisite permits to do so. When the area residents complained about the potential for increased noise, Smith dismissed the complaints. In a 2008 interview, he asked, “Do you have any friends that built a house close to a speedway that didn’t know there was a speedway here? Can you imagine? All of you knew there was a speedway here, right?”
When local officials delayed in granting the permits, Smith threatened to build the drag strip elsewhere and move the speedway, which helps to foster a motorsports industry with an estimated worth of $6 billion a year in North Carolina.

It is not clear whether SMI – which owns the track and seven others in Georgia, Tennessee, California, Kentucky, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas – has yet received any of the $80 million it was allegedly promised.

A judge dismissed the lawsuit last year but Smith is now trying to resurrect it. A three-judge state Court of Appeals panel will hold a closed-door discussion to determine whether the lawsuit will be heard by a jury. They are expected to reach a decision within the next three months and, if they decide to allow the case to move forward, it could be appealed to the Supreme Court. If the lawsuit does not move forward, SMI may have to wait as long as 40 years to be reimbursed.

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