Duane Morris Class Action Review - 2023 - Report - Page 125
element (that the defendant’s intentional misconduct caused no physical harm to class
members, only financial harm) was important. Id. *6. The court found the third element
(the ratio between jury award and civil penalty) was inapplicable to the case at hand
because the jury’s award came directly from calculations made pursuant to the statute.
This element weighed against a reduction. Id.
In the absence of direct guidance, the court ordered an amount between the statutory
maximum and the jury’s actual damages, or a financial minimum. It recognized the GBL
could permit up to $91 million in damages, but the court shied away from this maximum,
finding it “so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportionate to the offense” and
thus violative of the due process clause. Id. Instead, the court issued an award of
approximately $8 million because it found this amount was one owed under GBL §
349(h) at a rate of $50 per unit of Joint Juice sold and was more proportionate to the
Premier’s offense. Id. The court recognized its $8 million award exceed the jury’s actual
damages award by more than five times, but ordered it nonetheless, resting again on its
reasonableness relative to the $91 million statutory maximum and the $1.4 million
actual award from the jury. Id.
In McLaren, et al. v. The UPS Store, Inc., 32 F.4th 232 (3d Cir. 2022), the Third Circuit
overruled a district court ruling that the plaintiffs’ notary fee class was untimely because
the state court complaints did not trigger the thirty-day removal period clock to begin
running.
On behalf of UPS customers, the plaintiffs filed a putative class against the shipping
company in New Jersey state court, alleging UPS’s notary services provider charged
them an amount exceeding the fee permitted by New Jersey law. Id. at 232-34.
Because the plaintiffs’ putative class members purchased notary services from UPS
stores in New Jersey, they brought claims against UPS in two separate class action
complaints: one against Defendant UPS and the other against UPS’s franchisees. Id.
The plaintiffs filed these actions in New Jersey state court, one in May 2020 and the
other in November 2020, though both complaints averred putative class members paid
at least $2.50 more for notary services at UPS than New Jersey law permitted. Id.
The named plaintiff contended UPS’s records would identify “hundreds if not thousands”
of class members while the other class representative, Tripicchio, averred membership
in his putative class could also be identified by UPS’s records but would yield less than
5,000 individuals. Id. at 235.
The defendants removed both complaints to federal court, asserting that the Class
Action Fairness Act’s (CAFA) jurisdictional requirements were met and that the district
court had jurisdiction because each case involved minimally diverse parties, each case
involved a plaintiff class of at least 100 members, and UPS’s internal corporate
documents demonstrated the number of notary transactions allegedly exceeding $2.50
could lead to damages exceeding $5 million in each case. Id.
The plaintiffs moved to remand and the court granted he motion because, it found, the
complaints’ allegations permitted the defendants to “reasonably and intelligently
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Duane Morris Class Action Review – 2023
