Manatt's Brad Seiling, co-chair of the firm's Class Actions practice, participated in California Lawyer's annual Class Action roundtable. Published in the magazine's June 2015 issue, the discussion focused on the latest class action developments, including two important U.S. Supreme Court cases on the horizon.
When asked what effects Robins v. Spokeo will have with regard to questions of standing, Seiling responded:
"This is another interesting area to me where the politics and the law collide, and congressional action could have forestalled this issue. You create a statute like the Telephone Consumer Privacy Act, that has statutory damages, but you don't think through the fact that people make a lot of phone calls, and it's easy to get to $1 billion pretty quickly. So the fix for that is to do what Congress has done in things like the Truth In Lending Act and the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, which cap the amount of statutory damages in a class act to avoid the situation of "annihilating" damages."
Read the article here.