Scylla, Charybdis, and Class Certification

In Slade v. Progressive Insurance, a putative class survived a challenge to its damages model based on Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, 133 S. Ct. 1426 (2013). The Fifth Circuit concluded that the class avoided Scylla “by essentially rerunning Defendant’s calculation of actual cash value [for a damaged car] but with a lawful base value, Plaintiffs’ damages theory only pays damages resulting from the allegedly unlawful base value.” But the class then encountered Charybdis when a new issue arose from that calculation: “[B]y accepting Defendant’s condition score calculation as is, [named] Plaintiffs may have impermissibly waived unnamed class members’ ability to assert a future claim contesting Defendants’s computation” of a figure called “the condition factor.” This potential waiver raised a question as to whether the class representatives could adequately represent the class memebrs who might wish to challenge that factor, and the Court remanded for further consideration of that aspect of class certification. The Court also reminded that “a fraud class action cannot be certified when individual reliance will be an issue”; a particularly relevant reminder after the recent approval of class certification in Torres v. SGE Management, 838 F.3d 629 (5th Cir. 2016) (en banc). No. 15-30010 (May 9, 2017).