Gordon & Rees Orange County partners Jeff Swedo and Doug Smith and senior counsel Nate Tarvin prevailed on a motion to deny certification to a putative class of consumers on claims that Gordon & Rees’s client, a national distributor of lithium ion batteries and power tools, knowingly distributed millions of batteries with a design and manufacturing defect which caused them to fail prematurely, and then failed to honor the product warranty.
The class plaintiff asserted causes of action for breach of express and implied warranty and under the Consumer Legal Remedies Act. Working closely with technical experts from the outset of the case, the Gordon & Rees team demonstrated that the proposed action could not be managed on a class-wide basis due to the need for individualized inquiries into the cause of each purported premature battery failure and the inability to identify the members of the proposed classes.