Shon Morgan

Los Angeles

Litigation

Shon Morgan has had a string of successes as chairman of his firm's national class action practice group, where he has defended more than 300 class actions in 25 states on behalf of The Home Depot, Ancestry.com and leading universities, among others.

"You'll get a letter saying, 'I'm going to file 10,000 arbitrations against your client.' Those filings trigger fees for the company that can be $4,000 per claimant," Morgan said. "So the company is confronted with a multi-million dollar liability before it has even appeared and completely untethered to the merits."

Such was the case with Ancestry.com, which was being sued for violating privacy rights in six states. However, Morgan showed that the site's information is culled from public records and had no monetary value for the subjects.

"It's not enough for a plaintiff to show the company profited by using the image. The person suing must show she could have monetized it," Morgan said. "The statute works for celebrities. But Joan Smith on Elm Street, her name or yearbook picture doesn't have value she could otherwise monetize."

A court in the Northern District of California granted a motion to dismiss, other cases are pending.

Meanwhile, Morgan led his team in defending universities across the nation against 17 class actions by students seeking tuition refunds because of a switch to online classes during the COVID pandemic. Morgan recently achieved two denials of class certification on behalf of Brandeis and Suffolk universities, while winning summary judgments for Boston University and the University of Rhode Island. The class certification got defeated in others.

"Every university's expenses increased during Covid because it took tremendous resources to pivot to online," Morgan said. "They had to put video cameras in every classroom and hire additional tech staff. At the same time they lost expected on-campus revenue from housing, food, sports events, etc. So it's not as if universities reaped a windfall from remote learning. They were impacted by the shutdowns like other businesses."

Given the alternative of not going to school in states that were shut down, students paid tuition because they wanted to keep attending class, Morgan said.

For a Home Depot wage dispute, Quinn Emmanuel was brought in after a class of 140,000 California employees was already certified over not receiving pay for the few seconds it took to walk through the front door to the back of the store. Morgan's team challenged the plaintiff's certification experts, causing the judge to exclude their $1.6-billion damages models. It was settled on favorable terms before trial. Utne v. Home Depot, 3:16-cv-01854 (N.D. Cal., filed April 8, 2016).

--Tori Richards