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Defendants on the losing side of a class certification order were recently provided with a roadmap of how to challenge a district court’s analysis on appeal.

On April 12, 2023, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit vacated and remanded a district court’s class certification order because it failed to “rigorously analyze” the prerequisites to certify a class under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23. The appellate court held that the district court abused its discretion by failing to “go beyond the pleadings” – in other words, the plaintiffs’ allegations – in its analysis. 

Last month, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales granted permission for Eurasian Natural Resources Corp. Ltd. (“ENRC”) to appeal the May 2017 decision by the High Court[1] relating to a dispute over the legal professional privilege with the Serious Fraud Office (“SFO”).[2] The Court of Appeal will likely hear the case next year.

mining2Venezuela is taking its fight over a $1.4 billion arbitral award to the District of Columbia’s federal court of appeals.

The award capped a bitter dispute between Venezuela and Crystallex International Corporation, a Canadian mining company. The fight began in 2002, when Crystallex acquired the rights to develop the Las Cristinas gold deposits in Venezuela. Despite the mining company’s years-long efforts to obtain the necessary permit, Venezuela denied Crystallex the permit in 2008. Later that year, the country announced that it would operate and exploit Las Cristinas itself.  

We wrote here previously regarding the Sixth Circuit’s decision in Shane Group v. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan vacating a class action settlement because the district court improperly refused to unseal the parties’ substantive filings. In revisiting the district court’s sealing orders, the Court of Appeals found that the parties’ cursory justifications for their sealing requests were “patently inadequate.” And based on this failure to elucidate reasons for sealing, the Sixth Circuit vacated every one of the district court’s sealing orders. Since its decision in June, the Sixth Circuit had occasion to interpret and apply Shane Group, and in doing so, offered key learnings for litigants seeking to toe the line for compliance with the Sixth Circuit’s newly-pronounced standard.

In Baral v. Schnitt, the California Supreme Court addressed a question that has divided California appellate courts for more than a decade: whether a special motion to strike under California’s anti-SLAPP statute (C.C.P. 425.16) can be granted with respect to a “mixed cause of action” that combines allegations concerning both protected conduct, i.e., the rights of petition and free speech, and unprotected activity.

The California Court of Appeal recently ruled that an inspection demand under California Corporations Code section 1601 requires a corporation to make its books and records available for inspection at an office where they normally are kept, rather than at an office in California. Innes v. Diablo Controls, Inc.. Section 1601, likely familiar to most California corporations, permits inspection by shareholders of a corporation’s accounting books and records and shareholder and board proceeding minutes, and provides that the relevant records be open to inspection “at any reasonable time during usual business hours.” Diablo Controls is a California corporation that maintained certain of its records at a corporate office in Illinois. The appellant shareholders sought an order compelling the corporation to make its books and records available for inspection at a Diablo Controls office in California.

oil-3A long-running dispute between Chevron and Ecuador appears to have reached its end after the Supreme Court declined to take up Ecuador’s question of whether United States courts had jurisdiction to confirm a $96 million arbitration award in favor of Chevron.

The case arose out of a decades-long contractual dispute between Ecuador and Texaco Petroleum. In the 1970s, the oil giant and the South American country entered into a contract for Texaco to develop Ecuadorian oil fields in exchange for selling oil to the Ecuadorian government at below-market rates. Texaco brought several lawsuits in the 1990s in Ecuador’s courts, alleging that Ecuador violated the terms of the agreement. Chevron acquired Texaco in 2000. Meanwhile, in 1993, Ecuador and the United States had entered into a Bilateral Investment Treaty (“BIT”) under which Ecuador offered to arbitrate disputes with American investors involving investments that existed on or after the treaty’s effective date. 

2016-Federal-Rules-of-Appellate-Procedure-188x300Several amendments to the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure are scheduled to take effect on December 1, and one of those amendments is causing consternation among appellate practitioners: a 1000-word reduction in the word limit for principal briefs, along with a 500-word reduction for reply briefs. Since 1998, the Rules have allotted parties 14,000 words for their principal briefs, provided that they comply with certain typeface requirements. Under the new Rules, that limit will be reduced to 13,000 words. Reply briefs will continue to be limited to half the length of principal briefs, and will therefore be shortened by 500 words.

In support of the rule change, the Advisory Committee noted that the current 14,000-word limit resulted from an attempt in 1998 to convert the 50-page limit then in effect into a cap on words. At that time, the Committee concluded that briefs generally contained about 280 words per page — and 280 words-per-page times 50 pages equaled 14,000 words. Now, the Committee has revised its view and concluded that appellate briefs prior to 1998 actually had closer to 250 words per page, which in its view justified reducing the word limit to 12,500 words. Pushback from appellate practitioners resulted in the new limit being upped from 12,500 to 13,000 words.