A pair of plaintiffs’ teams kick off the runners-up in what turned out to be a rough week in the courts for Boeing and its 737 MAX 8 partners. Co-lead counsel at Bathaee Dunne and Dovel & Luner got a ruling last week from U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant III in Sherman, Texas, certifying classes of Southwest and American Airlines ticket buyers pursuing RICO claims for overcharges against Boeing and Southwest alleging they provided incomplete and false information concerning the safety of 737 MAX 8. Yavar Bathaee, Brian Dunne, Andrew Wolinksy and Edward Grauman at Bathaee Dunne and Jeff Eichman and Greg Dovel of Dovel & Luner represent the plaintiffs in that consumer class action. Then this week, shareholders represented by Friedlander & Gorris and Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein got the greenlight from Vice Chancellor Morgan Zurn in the Delaware Court of Chancery to move forward on their claim that the company’s directors should have engaged in greater oversight to prevent two crashes that killed 346 passengers and crew members in October 2018 and March 2019. “While it may seem callous in the face of their losses, corporate law recognizes another set of victims: Boeing as an enterprise, and its stockholders,” Zurn wrote. The plaintiffs in the derivative litigation are represented by Joel Friedlander, Jeffrey Gorris and Christopher Foulds of Friedlander & Gorris and Richard Heimann, Katherine Lubin, Steven Fineman, Nicholas Diamond, Sean Petterson, Rhea Ghosh and Kartik Madiraju of Lieff Cabraser.
A joint team at Irell & Manella and SL Environmental Law Group get runners-up honors for landing an eight-digit verdict Wednesday in Los Angeles federal court for the City of Pomona in an environmental trial over contaminated water. The $48 million verdict against mining company SQM North America Corp. was $18 million more than what the city requested. The trial team for the city included Jason Sheasby and Lisa Glasser of Irell, as well as Kenneth Sansone of SL Environmental Law Group.
