Food manufacturers received a setback earlier this week, when Judge Thelton Henderson of the Northern District of California ruled that where a consumer identifies a specific class period in which a defendant food manufacturer labeled its products in a deceptive manner, the consumer does not have to allege the specific date he or she purchased … Continue Reading
A guy walks into a bar, orders some drinks, gets the bill and pays it, leaves and sues. A federal district court has no choice but not to dismiss his claim on the pleadings, but he is unlikely to prevail in the end, because he had no reasonable expectation he was going to negotiate a reasonable price with the bar, but rather that the bar was going to charge him its stated price.… Continue Reading
A few months ago, I wrote about a $1.2 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Beef Products, Inc. (BPI), a South Dakota-based meat processor, against ABC News Inc. found here. The most recent development in the case occurred on October 31 when lawyers for ABC filed a motion to dismiss. In September, BPI, along with Technology, … Continue Reading
As we’ve discussed previously in this blog, the Supreme Court’s plausibility pleading standard, as articulated in the Iqbal and Twombly cases often provides a rapid (and relatively inexpensive) pathway to defeat consumer fraud claims. At the ACI food regulatory conference last week, we discussed a strategy to take advantage of the plausibility pleading standard in … Continue Reading