THREAD:
1) I’m an attorney. I’m not currently practicing because I recently beat stage four cancer, and now I’m running for Congress. But for almost 10 years, I worked on a single class action lawsuit. I wasn't the only person working on it, but...
1) I’m an attorney. I’m not currently practicing because I recently beat stage four cancer, and now I’m running for Congress. But for almost 10 years, I worked on a single class action lawsuit. I wasn't the only person working on it, but...
2) I was the only person at my old firm who didn't work on anything else. The firm represents the Wisconsin (3 other states also involved) plaintiffs, commercial and industrial end users of natural gas (residential users paid regulated rates) in a class action seeking refunds...
3) from 10 large energy conglomerates who conspired with each other, & others (including Enron), to illegally increase the price of deregulated natural gas in Jan. 2000 - Oct. 2002. Gov’t agencies investigated, the defendants paid fines & penalties, & people went to jail, but...
4) to get the money back to the end users required civil litigation, & that's where we came in. The 10 years I spent on the case were all pre-trial, & a trial date still has yet to be set - yet there were several appeals, including 2 to SCOTUS, & 7 to the 9th Cir.
5) Plaintiffs won each appeal; in fact, on my last full day at the firm, we got 2 decisions from the 9th Cir. in our clients' favor. 1, Arandell v. CenterPoint Energy Services, case no. 16-17099, set significant antitrust precedent. calawyers.org/antitrust-ucl-…
6) The other, Arandell v. Cantera Resources, case no. 17-26277, is available here:
law.justia.com/cases/federal/…
law.justia.com/cases/federal/…
7) In 2017, we settled on behalf of the class with 4 of the defendant companies, & brought $23.5M back into the Wisconsin economy. The entities who received a check included the Milwaukee Public Schools, and a convent in Eau Claire.
8) I am proud of the work that I, and others at my old firm, did (and that is still being done now, without me) to get repayment to the Wisconsin end users of natural gas who overpaid so drastically.
9) It can take a very long time to get anything in the way of a win in a financial sense from such cases. My old firm paid salaries and ate expense costs on the natural gas case for over a decade, before obtaining any sort of financial return. It continues to do so, even now.
10) Some Rs have suggested that class action litigation should be killed, or so severely limited as to end all such work. But it's already difficult to bring and maintain such cases & I have seen first hand how effective such cases can be to keep large corporations in line.
11) If elected to Congress, one issue that I will pursue is intelligent reform of such litigation. Not limiting the cases in the sense the Rs have in mind, making it harder to bring them, but ways to "test" the litigation with fewer costly motions, making the cases and the...
12) courts work more efficiently. The defendants in the natural gas case brought well over 50 "dispositive" motions, each of which had to be fully briefed and argued, and each of which our case survived, but which easily could have been combined. The page limits and other...
13) rules that necessitated & allowed so many motions could easily be changed. Better court enforcement of calendars and deadlines is needed, and that should be addressed.
14) My name is Amy Washburn. I'm running for Congress because I think there are a lot of common sense solutions to issues that currently many don't even recognize to be problems. Class action litigation practice is one such area. I hope I will have your support. Thanks.
