b i controls that part of cafe the class action fairness act defines a mass action and makes removable as a mass action a lawsuit that advances the quote monetary relief claims of one hundred or more persons and quote that quote are proposed to be tried jointly on the ground that the plaintiff's claims involve common questions of law and fact and quote the critical language again is a lawsuit they did  the quote monetary relief claims of one hundred or more persons the statute does not say one hundred or more persons seeking monetary relief in a nutshell that is the insurers entire argument under their reading of capital there must be one hundred one or more persons seeking monetary relief but that is not the language of the statu and for obvious reasons congress selected to include the relevant language as part of cafe the class action fairness act thus the language that the plaintiffs that quote plaintiff's claims involve common questions law in fact congress is hearkening to rule twenty three commonality typicality superiority that is what this court was referring to invest sandie the bank of america seven thirty three a third eight six three when the ninth circuit stated that cafe also provides former the removal of mass actions that do not qualify as traditional class actions but otherwise meet its criteria just as a class action is often filed by a single individual on behalf of many congress focused on the monetary relief claim this of one hundred or more persons a nod to the numerosity requirement of rule twenty three not on the number of people seeking such monetary relief on their behalf the one hundred forty five homeowners named in exhibit one to the second amended complaint could have selected a single member of their class to bring this lawsuit on their behalf it would still be an action advancing the monetary relief claims of one hundred or more persons the fact that there are twenty six insurers bringing this lawsuit as a suburb these of those one hundred forty five this case unlike the sorry case that was subsequently related to it we don't know whether they have actually paid those claims but it is our we have had the representation made that that is what has happened we have not yet received copies of the insurance policy under which they are setting forth what we do know is that as subrogate use they have them specifically listed these one hundred forty five people by name by address by the specific amount of damage each individually suffered and that their claims by being a celebrity are entirely home ownership is these twenty six insurance companies that's true but the defense to those claims remains the individual defense to those homeowners claims if for example your honor mr is ari each of these claims involve a supply line with plastic coupling nuts at the end and we've maintained that they were over tightened and in the process cracked by brute force to tighten and that's what caused the  the plaintiffs maintain it's a design defect the evidence in the record so far in the lower court is that they fail at the rate of we make it claims not that they failed claims at the rate of about one for every one hundred and seventy five thousand that are made so we do not buy into the design defect claim but if the homeowner were to testify in deposition when i thought this home i removed every supply of supply line with  plastic coupling and only put in metal and said this plastic coupling hose you're showing me did not come from my house it could not have come from my house that testimony would be devastating to the are important and the court focused in part on the administrative nightmare in an ex rail at action where the state of mississippi says certainly there must be one hundred or more people that have been injured by this we don't know who they are we don't know where they are we don't know what their claims are but they're with us on this and the supreme court said no no that would be an administrative nightmare we're not dealing with that here know who they are where they are authorize removal of representative actions brought by states and sole plaintiffs on respondents theory it would have done so through the class action provisions not the mass actions provisions here that language would be adapted to read had congress wanted halfa removal of mass sections to be limited to cases with one hundred or more named plaintiffs it would have not provided for mass actions to be removable where the monetary relief claim of one hundred or more persons word issue that isn't the the language that the court was referring to was not the language in the statute it reminds me of honor and i realized this is what happens when we use different back all of those cases that broadly stated jurisdiction under arrest but as concurrent simply didn't apply that was not the facts of my case it was not a concurrent jurisdiction section when the supreme court is a focused on ex route actions parents patry i actually see where we have no idea who these people are they are unnamed unknown that is a very that's true i mean that i'm looking at page seven forty three of i'll call it the hood case and then i quoted certainly are talking about the definition of the word planted in it quote it certainly does not mean anyone named or it is seeking the monetary relief claims the number of claims the claims being sought are for one hundred or more plainly ask you this do you concede that the only plaintiffs in this lawsuit are the twenty six insurance company how many insurers are named plaintiffs to two plaintiffs how many people on whose behalf are monetary relief claims being sought one is sorry there's just one person on whose behalf monetary relief claims are advanced it is the monetary relief claims of zari one person to plaintiff seeking the relief of the one person if this is the flip side so now you twenty six plaintiffs seeking monetary relief claims on behalf of one hundred forty five persons they do not have any rights on their own they have no individual claims good case that supports your position that their claims are derivative or that if they meet the mass action such as why we asked this court to grant permission for appeal even the district court judge fitzgerald noted your honor there is they got there there were two ways that they could go around about getting their claims covered one is to submit them to easy flow and we did pay claims when that happened where we felt there was a problem that we were responsible for so for those individual homeowners we took care of them and that was resolved as they were probably probably not homeowners can get  no longer on the claims the the home of the clinton claims have been assigned by contract from the homeowners to the individual insurance companies that is no different than if if everyone physically injured at the las vegas shooting all four hundred eighty nine injured in fifty eight killed assigning their claims to me i am now have of the states have is a venue cause that were choir's that the claims of any property damage suffered at a home in those states be tried in the county where the property is located so they don't tend to get together and just flagrantly violate the venue statutes that is not that is something that will be argued played ron but it is something that is not that's what prevents that's what would be possible if they were they were thinking about something different it was a different kind of problem they were writing but when we follow supreme court case it's difficult to disregard of things they said and the would they were really thinking about a different kind of problem and they shouldn't have said those things the way they did they should've written a painting different well i think i think in that circumstance  most cases we would have to say you know you have a good argument you ought to go back to the supreme court and say you know what you said about the state parents page yeah whatever  classes of cases you know i don't think that we're in a position to say you know they just wrote an overly broad i think their language was ill advised they shouldn't have said what they said which i could say about a lot of cases but usually not always usually we did so much fairly clear language and your honor i really think the focus is the statute the language of the statute is that the supreme court was dealing because people weren't named because they had no idea who they were where they were other than the administrative nightmare part when it dealt with the monetary relief claims of one hundred or more persons it later would refer to this as one hundred named people that isn't what the statute says they were focusing on that nightmare th more persons as opposed to if congress meant one hundred people that's all they had to say if it of congress men and we don't mean the claims of one hundred people which is the order we've structured it in in just simple grammatical english but we mean one hundred people bringing monetary claims for monetary relief that's what we meant one hundred people that would have been the easiest thing in the world to a written that isn't what the statute s convoluted as to how the court wanted us to present that issue procedurally and decided that since he did not have the power to send cases out of state he was just going to let it go for now but the statutes for if i owned a home if i was one of these one hundred forty five people and i owned a home in pennsylvania and had this water damage my there the local statute would say pennsylvania has a statute that says any claims for property damage which this is must be brought and tried in the county where the property is located that's california has the same thing it's for obvious reasons you need to inspect the house you need to have the witnesses there that's why this becomes relevant is all of these people are there now where the action is pending when you consolidate cases from one hundred six from sixteen different states who knows how many different counties  hundred forty five different properties and put them all in one place that's the administrative nightmare now to try and deal with discovery and with what do you do with the how do you think there are car change the problem  way it changes it is the federal court would have the power to transfer to the courts where the property is located the state courts and i don't have that power of federal court would so we could say i'm going to transfer it from here to the eastern district of pennsylvania to the district court in this district court in texas it could spread them back to where they belong where the witnesses are where the property yes we can't do that in the state court proceeding mass action is any civil action which monetary relief claims of a hundred or more persons top proposed to be cry try jointly and the language goes on but in the mississippi case the court interpreted that section by inserting names as named plaintiffs in multiple times in the mississippi case the supreme court makes  is a reference to the named plaintiffs now in this case the appellant tries to get around that by saying that the we're really talking here about monetary relief planes  hundred or more persons and asked this court to interpret that language to focus on the suburb course the individual homeowners whose claims of already been paid more economical to group them when you have a common defect and you can group a number of small claims put them together then bring all those claims to the thomas r of the defendant and try them in that location it also promotes a judicial economy because for example there are about i believe about forty five claims in this matter that simply arise in california if we would go ahead and file those throughout california and many of these claims have a higher dollar value then we would potentially be looking at some type of a coordinating proceeding so that we didn't get inconsistent results by doing it this way we have all of the claims in one locale again the thomas trial the defendant and it can be controlled by one judge and litigated it saves judicial resources it's much more economical all around leaves you your surgeon is that there's one defect that you can prove that most of the discovery taking place at the at the place of manufacturing the product honor there is a common defect throughout all of these claims there is a specific defect and we simply have failures in numerous locales throughout the united states predominantly california so if you prove jurisdiction but now is simply a matter of statute and it is clear that in this case jurisdiction lies according to california law in the san bernardino s venue and therefore the demur was overruled simply because they chose to attack then you on an improper basis they then chose to attack then you by bringing a specific motion which of course by then was  far cheaper for them to do it that way in this particular case the defendant took another tack they employed a strategy to break the case up with a view to i think forcing the from that i think of lot of about eight hundred dollars up to i believe the highest is in the in the high to the zora case they came across actually a combination that's four hundred ten thousand dollars but lost the court does not need to go there in here the all the court house to do is to follow the guidance of the supreme court and even which was the second amended complaint it's now the amount in this you is about eight point four million dollars because more people joined no because when we filed not all of the losses were fully adjusted ok and so short thank you ron or briefly a lot of i think a lot of these issues are at this time not relevant it shouldn't if the court is going to say if these losses were not adjusted and the homeowner still have skin in the game we don't know that all we have is a complaint and removal is determined at the time the complaint is filed there's been no discovery we don't have an opportunity to come back later that's not a new pleading a new filing to say ups we've just realized all one hundred forty five of these people either of these people have a financial interest in the outcome of this case and now we're going to remove it to federal court now is the time we have to make that decision we also are small numbers of people bringing claims on behalf of many and the inch the claims that you are hearing of we are bringing these claims on behalf of all of these people and we believe this is their argument if they prove one thing it establishes it for everybody that's the hallmark of a class action without having to meet its requirements that's what counsel wants to get in this case to bring at the equivalent of a class action avoid removal under cafe and claim that all we have to do is say well we think one single issue affects everybody and we have photos of those coupling nuts we have some that look like some gorilla tighten that with a with a monkey but congress is doing is making more cases removable to federal court not less more but not just a class action but if you try to bring it as a mass action because sometimes we'll see complaints with one hundred people listed on it as plaintiffs and saying well we're just bringing this as a single case that's remaining we addressing your argument that this is conceptually similar to a class action congress provided for that to happen well the discovery when we talk about discovery because the court raised this issue in council says yes damages they can see damages that to be proven individually but somehow without any reference to the homeowners or any discovery from the homeowners how was that done without inspecting the property without asking the homeowner who installed this how was it installed what type of it you mean the fences to have whether it was cracked when at that time whether it was even in the property we don't even have a chain of custody how do we know that the supply hose came from that house so to say well you don't get to defend yourself on that just take it on our word doesn't that doesn't work of course we have that opportunity what if it's not paid and if that was not paid in the homeowners still had a financial interest well that's we don't know at this point and they are not the real parties in interest i have to disagree with council on this the courts make clear sanding those that the homeowner himself the sobre gore himself has so any defenses of the sub record including standing or anything else are available that's that is the situation so they are not the real parties standing or jurisdiction no you don't have the if there is no diversity with the homeowner there would be no diversity jurisdiction even if there was with the insurer and there are cases even the us supreme court has said that we've said that they are brief so are you know if the supreme court your honor to drive hold as hard said that catherine respire has concurrent jurisdiction and this court is faced with a case where the statute specifically deals with a section on on exclusively federal court jurisdiction i don't think we'd be bound by that overly broad language even if it came from the supreme court i understand the supreme court focused on that part of the statute of one hundred or more persons whose claims that we are trying to be tried not the monetary relief claims of one hundred or more persons it is a fundamentally different case that is is what we urge the court that it is it if you look at the plain language of the statute the way it is written there is nothing in kathak that requires one hundred people bring it monetary relief claims that it's not the way it was worded it was not the way it was worth it it's worded they reverse it's worded to mirror a class action that a small number of people could bring monetary relief claims on behalf of one hundred or more that's what would make it a class action it needs the numerosity requirement it's that's the same thing in a regular rule twenty three class action i'm bringing it are there more than thirty other people or how many in forty other people that are going to be in this class that i'm representing and my bringing claims on behalf of o