The Court of Appeal of the State of California, First Appellate District, recently held that a forum selection clause in favor of a New York forum was unenforceable where the clause included a predispute jury trial waiver, which is unenforceable under California law but which would have been enforceable under New York law. Accordingly, the Appellate Court reversed the order of dismissal entered by the trial court. A copy of the opinion in Handoush v. Lease Finance Group, LLC is available at: Link to Opinion. The plaintiff storeowner filed a lawsuit against the defendant company alleging that the defendant supposedly defrauded…
Posts tagged as “California”
The Court of Appeals of California, Second District, recently upheld a trial court’s ruling reducing the amount of a plaintiff’s attorney’s fee award in a consumer litigation action to less than 40% of the amount sought by the plaintiff’s counsel. A copy of the opinion in Morris v. Hyundai Motor America is available at: Link to Opinion. The opinion was later revised slightly and certified for publication: Link to Opinion. A car buyer sued the manufacturer of a used car she purchased under California’s Song-Beverly Consumer Warranty Act, Civ. Code, § 1790 et seq., for alleged defects that the manufacturer refused to…
Three new laws signed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in recent days will impact consumer credit in the state by capping interest rates on payday and other consumer installment loans, giving automatic exemptions for bank account levies and removing exemptions for attorneys and mortgage loans from the Rosenthal Act. California Financing Law Expanded AB 539 amends the California Financing Law, which licenses and regulates finance lenders and brokers, by imposing new restrictions on loans of $2,500 or more but less than $10,000. It also adds a rate cap on those loans so that the annual simple interest rate may not…
The Court of Appeal for the Second District of California affirmed an order denying class certification in a wage and hour litigation, holding that the plaintiffs’ proposed anonymous, double-blind survey and statistical sampling failed to address individualized issues for liability and damages. In so ruling, the Appellate Court held that the plaintiffs’ trial plan was unmanageable and unfair because, among other things, the proposed survey deprived the defendants of the ability to cross-examine the witnesses and to assert defenses. A copy of the opinion in McCleery v. Allstate Insurance Company is available at: Link to Opinion. In this putative class…
The Court of Appeal for the Second District of California held that California’s fee shifting statue in California Civil Code § 1717 permitted a former loan servicer and foreclosure trustee to recover their attorneys’ fees authorized by the contract, even though the deed of trust was assigned to another financial institution. However, the Court vacated the trial court’s award of attorneys’ fees against the borrower because the deed of trust only permitted attorneys’ fees to be added to the loan balance. A copy of the opinion in Chacker v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. is available at: Link to Opinion. The borrower…
On June 28, California passed into law the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, which becomes operative on Jan. 1, 2020. As with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, the Privacy Act gives consumers greater control over the use and sharing of their personal information. The Privacy Act allows a consumer to request that a business disclose: the categories and specific pieces of personal information that it collects about the consumer; the categories of sources from which that information is collected; the business purposes for collecting or selling the information; the categories of third parties with which the information is…