Seagate Hard Drive MDL Must Divide Into Multiple Classes, Judge Rules

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A judge says that consumers claiming that Seagate sold defective hard drives must divide into multiple Classes based on the failure rates of the various hard drives.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero said that there was too much variability in the failure rates of various hard drives bought by consumers for the plaintiffs to establish a common injury done by Seagate, which is a central requirement of building a multidistrict litigation.

To support this determination, Spero notes that tech companies release new versions of technologies very rapidly, so the consumers’ attempt to make claims that apply to defects in many different hard drives actually means they are lumping together many different generations of hard drives, which may have radically different issues.

However, the judge did say that the consumers could address the differences in hard drives by dividing one main Class up into subclasses, or simply use different Classes entirely.

The Seagate hard drive class action lawsuit was brought forward in 2016 by plaintiffs Adam Ginsberg, Dudley Lane Dortch IV, Dennis Crawford, and David Schechner, claiming that Seagate hard drives failed shortly after purchase.

Allegedly, some consumers experienced their hard drives failing within months after purchase, while others experienced failure weeks or even days after purchase. In conjunction with a comparable Seagate class action lawsuit, the claims eventually were combined into a multidistrict litigation.

The consumers attempted to allege that Seagate misrepresented the quality of its hard drives, misleading consumers into purchasing a product that did not perform as advertised, causing consumers financial injury.

The Seagate hard drive failure class action lawsuit attempted to address the failure of more than 40 different models of Seagate hard drives. Judge Spero argues that the consumers would have better luck before a jury if they pled specific defects and misrepresentation for each kind of hard drive.

He states that “materiality is a key part of this, and if you don’t show it, you don’t win. I guarantee that you are not going to be able to stand before the jury and say ‘[Seagate] knew that this was not a reliable drive.’ You’re going to have to be more precise.”

The consumers’ attorney disagreed, saying that they could viably lump hard drives into one category because the company allegedly made a practice of representing that the hard drives would last for a long period of time, regardless of what hard drive specifically was being sold.

Seagate’s attorney claimed that there was even more fundamental flaws in the consumers’ case, stating that they had failed to show that the consumers actually relied on advertised failure rates provided by Seagate to make their purchasing decisions, so they cannot claim that the consumers were injured by what the company stated about the products.

Also taking issue with what information consumers allegedly used to make purchasing decisions, Judge Spero disagreed with the consumers’ claim that they made purchasing decisions based on the fact that Seagate claimed the hard drives were compatible with a range of data backup systems, and were injured when the device was incompatible with backup systems, saying that they had not sufficiently proved that this was a factor for all consumers.

The plaintiffs are represented by Shana Scarlett of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP and Marc Goldich of Axler Goldich LLC.

The Seagate Hard Drives Multidistrict Litigation is In re: Seagate Technology LLC Litigation, Case No. 3:16-cv-00523, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.