The latest attempt at “picking off” a lead plaintiff in a class action got shot down on Tuesday — and by the same circuit that rejected a similar move earlier this summer.

“The idea of a theme and variations is a common one in music. It should be in law, too,” wrote Diane Wood, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in a class action against Volvo Cars of North America LLC. But numerous efforts by defendants to find loopholes to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2016 decision in Campbell-Ewald v. Gomez haven't been successful. That ruling found that an unaccepted offer of judgment made to a lead plaintiff did not moot his class action.

“Several variations on that theme have been tried and have failed,” wrote Wood, who also wrote a June 20 decision in Fulton Dental v. Bisco, which found that a defendant's $3,600 deposit into a court account that compensated the lead plaintiff did not moot the entire class action. “Undeterred, the defendant in the case now before us asserts that an unaccepted offer of relief before a putative plaintiff files a lawsuit deprives that plaintiff of standing. We see no reason why the timing of the offer has such a powerful effect.”