By Happy Holidays to our loyal readers of the Workplace Class Action Blog!
Our elves are busy at work this holiday season in wrapping up the galley proofs of our start-of-the-year kick-off publication – Seyfarth Shaw’s Annual Workplace Class Action Litigation Report.
We anticipate going to press in the first two weeks of January, and launching the 2012 Report to our readers from our Blog.
This will be our Eighth Annual Report, and the biggest yet with analysis of over 900 class certification rulings from federal and state courts in 2011.
The has been a year of seismic changes for employment-related class action litigation. The landscape of class action litigation was fundamentally reshaped as the result of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 131 S. Ct. 2541 (2011), and AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, 131 S. Ct. 1740 (2011). Rule 23 case law is in flux, and our reading of the tea leaves suggests that 2012 will be another year of evolving case law developments impacting our readers and their companies.
The “tipping point” aspects of these changes will be featured in the 2012 edition of the Annual Workplace Class Action Litigation Report. The Report is the sole compendium in the U.S. dedicated exclusively to workplace class action litigation, and has become the “go to” research and resource guide for businesses and their corporate counsel facing complex litigation. It analyzes rulings from all state and federal courts – including private plaintiff class actions and collective actions, and government enforcement actions – in the substantive areas of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, and the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005. It also features chapters on EEOC pattern or practice rulings, state law class certification decisions, and non-workplace class action rulings that impact employers. The Report also analyzes the leading class action settlements for 2011 for employment discrimination, wage & hour, and ERISA class actions, as well as settlements of government enforcement actions, both with respect to monetary values and injunctive relief provisions.