Readers will recall our posts about Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, 133 S. Ct. 1426 (2013), and the majority’s ruing that Rule 23 requires proof that damages and injury are amenable to class treatment, and not overrun with individual issues, before a class properly can be certified.

A district court considering class certification must look at how damages will be tried and managed if a class is certified. Is it a mere mathematical exercise, or are there factual issues that vary by class members? And the district court must conduct a rigorous analysis of the class plaintiff’s proposed method for computing damages allegedly on a class-wide basis (which often will require a Daubert analysis in many cases).

While it is unusual for a dissenting justice to read the dissent from the bench, in this case two justices did so. One wonders whether that emphasis on the intensity of the dissent is inconsistent with the content of the dissent, which tried to argue that the decision could be limited to its facts, nothing big happened here, nothing to look at, keep moving…  The plaintiffs’ bar has been desperate to convince the lower courts to adopt the dissenting view, but with limited success as district courts continue to rely on Comcast to deny class certification. E.g., Torres v. Nutrisystem Inc., 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 66444 (C.D. Cal. Apr. 8, 2013).

Earlier this month the D.C. Circuit relied on the precedent in In re: Rail Freight Fuel Surcharge Antitrust Litigation – MDL No. 1869, No. 12-7085, 2013 U.S. App. LEXIS 16500 (D.C. Cir. Aug. 9, 2013), to confirm that plaintiffs must have a way to establish class-wide proof of damages and injury.

In In re: Rail Freight Fuel Surcharge, plaintiffs allegedly shipped products via rail and were required to pay rate-based fuel surcharges by several major freight railroads. The heyday of the rate-based fuel surcharge did not last. Eventually, the Surface Transportation Board (STB) put an end to the practice with respect to common carrier traffic within its regulatory authority. But plaintiffs alleged collusion and price fixing among the defendants in the meantime.  The district court granted class certification.

The plaintiffs’ case for certification hinged on two regression models prepared by their expert. The first of these, the “common factor model,” attempted to isolate the common determinants of the prices shippers paid to the defendants. The expert also constructed a “damages model,” which sought to quantify, in percentage terms, the overcharge due to conspiratorial conduct at various intervals over the class period.

On appeal, after a discussion on interlocutory appeal standards, the D. C. Circuit held that meeting the predominance requirement demanded more than common evidence the defendants colluded to raise fuel surcharge rates. The plaintiffs must also show that they can prove, through common evidence, that all class members were in fact injured by the alleged conspiracy.  On the damages prong, defendants argued that the expert’s model purported to quantify the injury in fact to all class members attributable to the defendants’ collusive conduct. But the same methodology also detected injury where none could exist.  In Comcast, the Court held that indisputably the role of the district court is scrutinize such evidence before granting certification, even when doing so “requires inquiry into the merits of the claim.” 133 S. Ct. at 1433. If the proposed damages model cannot withstand this scrutiny then, that is not just a merits issue. Here, the expert’s model was essential to the plaintiffs’ claim that they could offer common evidence of class-wide injury. See Fuel Surcharge II, 287 F.R.D. at 66. No damages model, no predominance, no class certification.

Moreover, the court of appeals noted that it is not enough to submit a questionable model whose unsubstantiated claims cannot be completely refuted through a priori analysis. Otherwise, “at the class-certification stage any method of measurement is acceptable so long as it can be applied class-wide, no matter how arbitrary the measurements may be.” Comcast, 133 S. Ct. at 1433.

Before Comcast v. Behrend, the case law was far more accommodating to class certification under Rule 23(b)(3), said the court of appeals. It is now clear, however, that Rule 23 not only authorizes a hard look at the soundness of statistical models that purport to show predominance—the rule commands it.  Mindful that the district court neither considered the damages model’s flaw in its certification decision nor had the benefit  of Comcast’s guidance, the court decided to vacate class certification and remand the case to the district court to afford it an opportunity to consider these issues in the first instance..

The case is useful beyond the antitrust world in its recognition that Comcast did make a difference in how lower courts are to treat the issue of predominance with respect to an analysis of injury and damages. Certification of a class without class-wide proof of both injury and damages is subject to reversal on the prong of predominance.