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Attorneys from Ahdoot & Wolfson and Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy will lead a privacy class action against Zoom Video Communications.

In an order Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh of the Northern District of California appointed Tina Wolfson of Ahdoot & Wolfson in Los Angeles and Mark Molumphy of Cotchett Pitre in Burlingame, California, as interim co-lead class counsel.

For the plaintiffs' steering committee, Koh tapped Rachele Byrd of Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz in San Diego and Albert Chang of Bottini & Bottini in La Jolla, California.

The judge also added Eric Gibbs of the Gibbs Law Group in Oakland, California, to the steering committee because of his previous experience as lead counsel in In re Adobe Systems Privacy Litigation.

Koh said in the decision that she received nine separate applications to serve as interim lead class counsel in the case. In Wolfson and Molumphy's appointment application, the attorneys cited their team's experience with half a dozen class actions including the Experian data breach, Google tracking and Apple device throttling cases.

"Members of the Wolfson-Molumphy team have led numerous high-profile privacy cases affecting millions of consumers … other types of consumer class actions and shareholder derivative litigation arising out of technological vulnerabilities … and a myriad of other types of high-stakes consumer litigation, all to great success," said the attorneys in the filing.

The class action consolidated several complaints against the videoconferencing company accusing it of failing to properly secure its platform. As consumers and businesses flocked to Zoom amid the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual classes, work meetings and even Bible studies have reported "Zoom bombing," a term used when hackers interrupt video calls, sometimes with expletives or pornographic images.

The class also includes plaintiffs who assert that Zoom has invaded the privacy of millions of users by collecting personal information without proper disclosures and authorization, as well as users suing for the company's false claims of end-to-end encryption.

Koh issued specific guidelines on the law firms that could contribute to the case.

"Other than the plaintiffs' steering committee, no other law firms shall work on the instant case without prior approval of the court," she wrote. "Motions for approval of additional plaintiffs' counsel shall identify the additional plaintiffs' counsel and their background, the specific proposed tasks, and why plaintiffs' steering committee cannot perform these tasks. If attorney's fees are ultimately awarded in this case, the court will not award fees for additional plaintiffs' counsel whom the court has not approved. Interim co-lead counsel should seek approval before additional plaintiffs' counsel begin work on the case."

In the Yahoo data breach settlement, which Koh is also overseeing, the judge has asked to see the total number of people billing by hour in a $30 million attorney fee request. "I'm not going to award any attorney fees until I get it," she said at a hearing in June. The San Jose jurist also pushed back against billing rates in 2018 when she oversaw the Anthem data breach litigation. In that case, Koh appointed a special master to investigate potential overbilling and said she was "deeply disappointed" in the fee request.