Opinion ID: 2732311
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Proposed Grouping of State Laws

Text: Appellants next contend that even if each class member’s home state law controlled their claims, the District Court erred in finding such claims impractical for class treatment. Appellants urged that the state consumer fraud statutes should be grouped into two categories for the purposes of litigation, those which proscribe (1) “unfair or deceptive” conduct (similar to the Federal Trade Commission Act), and (2) those that prohibit false or misleading conduct. (Appellants’ Opening Br. at 32.) Appellants again rely on Sullivan where we endorsed the general procedure of grouping multiple state laws into a few categories for the 15 purposes of class litigation. There we stated that, “[w]e [have] emphasized our willingness to certify nationwide classes where differences in state law fell ‘into a limited number of predictable patterns,’ and any deviations ‘could be overcome at trial by grouping similar state laws together and applying them as a unit.’” 667 F.3d at 301. The District Court took note of the grouping proposal by Appellants and found it wanting. The Court noted that Appellants’ analysis consisted “solely” of citation to, and brief discussion of one district court case which followed such a procedure, and an exhibit setting forth the National Consumer Law Center’s 2009 analysis of various state consumer fraud statutes. (App. 37.) The District Court noted that “[n]o effort has been made to demonstrate how Plaintiffs’ claims of deception through overbilling could be proven under the statutes’ varying elements of reliance, state of mind, and causation, to name a few. In other words, Plaintiffs have proposed two groups, but have not demonstrated how this grouping would apply to the facts and issues presented by this case . . . .” (Id.) Plaintiffs also provided no indication as to how the jury could be charged in some coherent manner relative to the proposed grouping. The District Court concluded that plaintiffs simply had “not met [their] burden” of demonstrating that grouping was warranted or workable. (App. 38.) We agree with the District Court and conclude that while grouping, in general, may be a permissible approach to nationwide class action litigation, in this case Appellants did not provide enough information or analysis to justify the certification of the classes they proposed. For example, in In re Prudential, we noted that the grouping proposal there consisted of a “series of charts setting forth comprehensive 16 analyses of the various states’ laws potentially applicable to their common law claims.” 148 F.3d 283, 315 (3d Cir. 1998) (internal quotation marks omitted). Such in-depth treatment justified the District Court’s decision to group state laws in that case, but is lacking here. In addition, Court of Appeals decisions cited in Sullivan explicitly recognized that plaintiffs face a significant burden to demonstrate that grouping is a workable solution. See Klay v. Humana, Inc., 382 F.3d 1241, 1262 (11th Cir. 2004) (“The burden of showing uniformity or the existence of only a small number of applicable standards (that is, ‘groupability’) among the laws of the fifty states rests squarely with the plaintiffs.”) (abrogated on other grounds); Walsh v. Ford Motor Co., 807 F.2d 1000, 1017 (D.C. Cir. 1986) (“[T]o establish commonality of the applicable law, nationwide class action movants must creditably demonstrate, through an ‘extensive analysis’ of state law variances, ‘that class certification does not present insuperable obstacles.’”). We agree with the District Court that Appellants have failed to provide a sufficient, or virtually any, analysis describing how the grouped state laws might apply to the facts of this case. They assert only that the differences between the state laws within each group are “insignificant or non-existent.” (Appellants’ Opening Br. at 27.) As the District Court held, Appellants must do more than provide their own ipse dixit, citation to a similar case, and a generic assessment of state consumer fraud statutes, to justify grouping. Thus, it was not an abuse of discretion for the District Court to find that Appellants had not carried their burden to show that grouping was workable, and that, consequently, the variations in state laws precluded the proposed groups. We also find no abuse of discretion in the 17 Court’s final conclusion that class litigation involving dozens of state consumer fraud laws was not viable and that common facts and a common course of conduct did not predominate. We therefore affirm the denial of certification of the PostEOB Billing Class and the Anthem BCBS FEHB Class, as to the state law consumer fraud claims.