The difference between state litigation and individual litigation are sometimes often just who it’s being brought on behalf of. And so, we’ll have class actions which are a group of of people or individual litigation.
When a state brings a lawsuit, it’s based on the state claims and usually on behalf of the people of the state. But one interesting difference in a lot of the cases we bring are what the violation is and what you have to prove to have a violation.And so states have laws to prevent things like fraud or deceit or deception.
And, so one way to think of that is it doesn’t matter if you hit somebody when you were speeding in a school zone. What matters is that you were speeding in a school zone. You’re still going to get a ticket. And, so what states can do is they can hand out tickets for the bad act, for the deceit, for the fraud, regardless of having to go that extra mile to show that somebody was actually harmed. And, so did you break the law? Yes or no.
And, so whether we’re representing a state on behalf of social media addiction or an automobile company like General Motors collecting all of our user data through OnStar without telling us, that in itself is a violation of the state law, whether or not that information was ever used to harm somebody in the state. And, so what states will do is they’ll try to set the tone and say what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable.
Privacy is one of those big areas whether companies are taking facial recognition data or tracking your location without telling you. A state can come in and say these are the laws of the state and it’s not okay.
