MDL Panel Sends Marriott Data Breach Cases to Maryland
On Wednesday, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation appointed U.S. District Judge Paul Grimm to oversee more than 80 class actions against Marriott.
February 07, 2019 at 02:19 PM
2 minute read
Judge Paul Grimm of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland in his chambers. Nov. 3, 2016. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM
A federal judicial panel has sent class actions filed over Marriott's data breach, which compromised the personal data of 500 million guests at the hotel chain's Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide properties, to Maryland.
In Wednesday's order, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation appointed U.S. District Judge Paul Grimm to oversee more than 80 class actions brought over the breach.
“Marriott is headquartered in that district, and relevant documents and witnesses thus likely will be found there,” panel chairwoman Sarah Vance wrote of the Maryland district, which is in Baltimore. “Defendants and the vast majority of responding plaintiffs support selection of this district, and far more actions are pending there than in any other district.”
Lawyers for Marriott International Inc., based in Bethesda, Maryland, and several plaintiffs' attorneys, had supported the venue. Others had pushed for federal courts in Connecticut, California, Florida, Illinois and New York.
The panel also ordered that the multidistrict litigation proceeding include securities class actions, rejecting arguments from The Rosen Law Firm, which sued Marriott and three of its senior executives on behalf of shareholders. The panel found there would be “overlapping factual issues and discovery.”
“Indeed, these factual issues likely will be central to both the securities action and the consumer class actions,” Vance wrote.
Grimm, a 2012 appointee of President Barack Obama who served as a federal magistrate judge in Maryland for 15 years, has experience in electronic discovery. The U.S. Judicial Conference's advisory committee on rules of evidence cited his 2005 opinion in Hopson v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore in establishing uniform rules on attorney work product in electronic discovery.
Since its Nov. 30 announcement about the breach, Marriott has lowered its estimate of the number of guests impacted to fewer than 383 million. It has announced its plans to launch a new loyalty program Feb. 13.
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