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What Are The Milestones Of The Court

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The Court’s August 24, 2017, Scheduling Order locks the case into a litigation timeline that includes some critical milestones but leaves others still undecided. In the short term, we anticipate that the Court will rule in favor of allowing the proposed amendments in the next 60 days. Any procedural challenges – regardless of the Motion’s outcome – will likely be briefed and resolved by next summer (with little real challenge to the case’s legitimacy).
The key milestones resolved at the last Status Conference are as follows: fact discovery will end on April 30, 2018. More importantly, Class Plaintiffs must serve their expert reports and Motion for Class Certification by August 31, 2018. The Defendants’ expert reports will be served by …show more content…

Applying that schedule, we can estimate a hearing roughly a year after the opening motion is served, August 2019.
In most class actions, class certification is one of two litigation events that focus the parties on reaching a compromise (the other being trial). The incentives to settle in Visa Interchange arising from class certification are significant. As to the Plaintiffs, the failure to certify the class could be catastrophic unless reversed on appeal, leaving them with few settlement options. Their case would be split into potentially thousands of individual actions. On the other hand, a certified class would increase Defendants’ risk enormously. It would pave the way for a jury to potentially rule against the network rules that generate tremendous fees for Defendants, most notably the default interchange fee. This would both limit interchange revenues going forward, and subject Defendants to massive backward looking damages which – this being an antitrust matter – would be subject to trebled damages. Defendant’s exposure would likely exceed their combined liquidity and insurance limits, if not their entire market valuations. At a minimum, class certification would substantially embolden Class Counsel and raise the cost of settlement.
As a result, we think it somewhat more likely than not that the parties avoid the risk associated with a decision on certification and settle the case after briefing (and possibly even after a hearing) on the Motion to Certify, but

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