In September 2024, on the heels of a year-long investigation by Justice Catalyst Law (“JCL”), Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP (“Lieff Cabraser”) and JCL filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier B.V., John Wiley & Sons, Wolters Kluwer NV, and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), on behalf of a putative class of scientists and scholars who allege that these six publishers of peer-reviewed scholarly journals conspired to unlawfully appropriate billions of dollars that would otherwise have funded scientific research. The suit explains that this scheme has resulted in a variety of perverse market failures that impair the ability of scientists to do their jobs and slow dramatically the pace of scientific progress, delaying advances across all fields of research, from finding effective treatments for cancer, to advances in quantum computing, to finding solutions to combat climate change. The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in New York, seeks treble damages and injunctive and other relief, including an order to enjoin the defendants from continuing to violate the law by requiring them to dissolve the challenged unlawful agreements.

On December 12, 2023, after more than a year of investigation by JCL, JCL and private firm Altshuler Berzon LLP filed a class action challenge to a “modern-day form of slavery” run by the State of Alabama and national private employers that disproportionally traps Black Alabamians into a forced labor scheme.  Plaintiffs brought this novel challenge under the Ku Klux Klan (“KKK”) Act, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”), and related federal civil rights laws. The class action suit challenges systemic unconstitutional over-detention on behalf of a class of incarcerated Alabamians, resulting from the impermissible racial skewing and operation of Alabama’s parole board as well as state policies requiring incarcerated people to work under threat of grave physical harm.  The plaintiffs include the country’s largest unions as plaintiffs, and the case seeks to dismantle the forced labor scheme and secure the immediate reform of the state’s parole system to comply with constitutional requirements.

On October 11, 2024, the plaintiff class secured preliminary approval of a $27.5 million class action settlement against Thomson Reuters (“TR Clear”), a media and data company, of a December 2020 class action lawsuit filed by JCL, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (“STOP”), and private law firms Gupta Wessler PLLC and the Gibbs Law Group LLP, for violating California privacy laws by harvesting the public and non-public private information of millions of California residents’ to create, and then sell without their consent, detailed profiles to commercial and government entities through its “CLEAR” web portal. Under the $27.5 million settlement, Californians will receive money for the commercial use of their information and TR Clear agreed to implement systemic reforms to address the privacy harms prospectively.

In 2021, after many months of investigation by JCL involving locating and interviewing hundreds of unhoused people living with opioid disorder across the country, JCL and the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund filed, and were later joined by private firm Althsuler Berzon as counsel, a class action against The Salvation Army for engaging in disability discrimination prohibited by the Rehabilitation Act by denying housing and services to people with opioid use disorder at its adult recovery centers.

People incarcerated in Massachusetts filed a lawsuit against the Massachusetts Department of Corrections to stop the DOC’s use of defective and faulty drug tests manufactured by Sirchie Acquisition Company, LLC.

In 2023, JCL, the National Consumer Law Center and Flitter Milz, P.C. secured a resolution to their 2019 class action lawsuit against Maximus Federal Services, Inc. (Maximus), which alleged that the company engaged in illegal collection activity against thousands of federal student loan borrowers who submitted Borrower Defense to repayment claims to the U.S. Department of Education (Department).  Plaintiffs secured their successful resolution after the presiding federal court denied defendants’ motions for summary judgment, finding that Maximus, the U.S. Department of Education’s largest student loan contractor, must comply with federal consumer protection law and, thus, plaintiffs’ claims on behalf of the victims of Defendants’ predatory and illegal debt collections practices would proceed to trial. 

In April 2023, JCL and national firms Berger Montague and Cuneo Gilbert and LaDuca (“CDL”) secured a resolution of $43.5 million in damages and sweeping injunctive relief for claims brought by the 2020 lawsuit filed by a plaintiff class of cheerleading gyms against Varsity Brands and the U.S. All Star Federation (USASF).  In this action, filed after JCL’s extensive nationwide investigation, plaintiffs sought redress for nationwide violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act, including defendants buying and shutting down its rivals in the All-Star cheer business to gain market dominance, and then using that market dominance to impose predatory contracts on All-Star gyms, requiring near exclusive patronage of Varsity’s products and services.  In addition to the sizeable damages resolution, the settlement unwound the key monopolization conduct for All Star cheer events in the United States.

 In June 2020, again after an extensive investigation conducted by JCL, national firms Cohen Milstein, HFA, and JCL filed a class action antitrust and RICO lawsuit against Global Tel*Link Corp. (“GTL”), Securus Technologies, LLC (“Securus”), and 3Cinteractive Corp. (“3CI”) for charging unlawfully inflated prices for collect calls made by incarcerated individuals in jails and prisons throughout the United States. Specifically, the suit alleges that Defendants secretly fixed inflated prices for calls between prisoners and their family members, friends, attorneys, and others, while also repeatedly lying to local governments and their own customers about the costs of those calls as a way to charge inflated prices. The lawsuit alleges that Securus and GTL were able to charge these excessive “single call” prices by secretly agreeing to eliminate competition between them and to fix the same inflated “single call” prices to consumers in violation of the federal antitrust laws. To justify charging such high prices for “single calls,” GTL and Securus claimed, in communications with both governments and consumers, that most of the prices consisted of “transaction fees” paid to 3CI to implement the calls although, in fact, Securus and GTL paid 3CI a mere fraction of the supposed “transaction fees” and secretly pocketed the difference, in violation of RICO. The lawsuit seeks to prevent the defendants from continuing their unlawful misconduct and to recover financial damages for the classes of purchasers.

In April 2019, after an investigation conducted by JCL with the National Consumer Law Center (“NCLC”), JCL and NCLC filed a national class action against the National Student Clearinghouse for alleging violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”) by overcharging for self-verification reports by $2.95 or $2.45 beyond the maximum set for self-verification reports by the FRCA.  Immediately after filing, the parties entered into mediation, successfully reaching a resolution that created a $1.9 million settlement fund and NSC agreeing to limit self-verification charges to the statutory maximum moving forward.  After approval of the settlement in January 2020 by the District Court, the First Circuit unanimously confirmed in 2021 the district court’s order approving the class settlement.

In 2024, JCL and national firms Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC (“Cohen Milstein”), Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP (“Hagens Berman”), and Handley Farah & Anderson (“HFA”), secured a ground-breaking resolution of the 2019 class action suit filed on the heels of a JCL investigation into the practices of the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and four national real estate brokerages for conspiring to require home sellers to pay for buyers’ brokers at an inflated commission in violation of federal antitrust law. A trial verdict in one of the group of cases spurred the 2024 settlement heralded as “prompt[ing] one of the biggest transformations to the housing market since New Deal-era regulations were put in place”, with defendants agreeing to pay $980 million to the nationwide class and abandoning the nationwide industry rules that suppressed competition and inflated housing costs for millions of Americans.

In 2020, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (“MALDEF”), Outten & Golden LLP (O&G), and JCL secured a successful resolution of class claims filed in 2020 against Wells Fargo for violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act by discriminating against a nationwide class of DACA recipients.  In this resolution, plaintiffs secured damage payments up to $19.6 million and changes in lending policies to provide consumer lending products to DACA recipients

In January 2019, after more than a year of investigation by JCL, the National Consumer Law Center, Public Counsel, Towards Justice, JCL and national law firm Lieff Cabraser, filed a first-of-its-kind class action lawsuit alleging that an antitrust conspiracy among companies offering commercial bail bonds unlawfully fixed the prices of the bond premiums since at least 2004, to the detriment of California’s most vulnerable citizens and the justice system itself. The class of plaintiffs allege that surety cartel operated by Defendants overpriced bail bonds, harming thousands of Californians, including people who were arrested but never charged, and family members who paid the inflated price to secure the release of their loved ones. The lawsuit explains that the scheme to inflate the price of commercial bail perpetuates an unfair system that entraps heavily-policed California communities in harmful cycles of poverty and consumer debt.