Ill. BIPA Case Should Be Dismissed, Says Ralphs, Citing Parallel Class Action
The plaintiffs in a class action alleging violations of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) class action knew that a “parallel and identical” action was pending in the district but decided to seek individual remedies for the same alleged…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
conduct, said defendants Food 4 Less Midwest and Kroger in a memorandum of law Nov. 17 (docket 1:23-cv-15345) in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois in Chicago in support of their motion to dismiss. The parallel case, Maetean Johnson v. Ralphs Grocery Company d/b/a Food 4 Less Midwest, and The Kroger Co. subsumes the 10 plaintiffs’ action in Garmon vs. Ralphs Grocery, d/b/a Food 4 Less, and Kroger, filed last month, as the plaintiffs in the Garmon case are putative class members of the Johnson litigation, said the memorandum. The issues in both actions are the same: whether employees in Illinois can recover from the defendants for alleged BIPA violations arising from their use of timeclocks while working for Food 4 Less stores within the statutory period, said the filing. Litigating the case before two different judges in the same district would waste judicial resources and potentially render conflicting rulings, it said. The complaint should be dismissed, or alternatively, the instant action should be stayed until Johnson is resolved, it said.