Justia U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals Opinion Summaries

Saint Francis Medical Center ("St. Francis") brought a class action suit against C.R. Bard, Inc. ("Bard"), a supplier of medical supplies, alleging that Bard's contracts with Group Purchasing Organizations violated the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. 1, 2, section 3 of the Clayton Act, 15 U.S.C. 14, and Missouri antitrust law, Mo. Rev. Stat. 416.121.1. At issue was whether the district court properly granted summary judgment for Bard. The court held that, based on the precedent of Concord Boat Corp. v. Brunswick Corp., and specifically Saint Francis's failure to identify a relevant submarket, the judgment of the district court granting summary judgment to Bard was affirmed.

Appellants appealed from an order granting summary judgment to appellee on a claim arising under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act ("WARN"), 29 U.S.C. 21202, and dismissing without prejudice supplemental state law claims. Appellants alleged that appellee hired them as temporary workers in the midst of a strike and then summarily dismissed them at the strike's conclusion without providing the notice required under the WARN Act. The court held that the district court properly weighed the evidence when determining how to classify the striking workers and did not err in determining that appellants had failed to provided a viable legal theory on which to base its calculations. Moreover, though appellants complained that it was unrealistic to think that 32 striking workers would depart voluntarily, they produced no evidence supporting an alternative scenario. Therefore, appellants' conclusory statements on these issues failed to create a genuine issue of material fact and did not preclude the grant of summary judgment. The court also rejected appellants' claim that the district court erred in considering and rejecting only two of the four theories it proffered where the district court may not have addressed each theory they put forth, but it clearly rejected them all by concluding that the reduction in force was insufficient to satisfy the numerosity threshold. Therefore, the court agreed with the district court that the various theories offered by appellants failed, as a matter of law, to establish that a mass layoff occurred that would trigger notice requirements of the WARN Act. Accordingly, the judgment was affirmed.

T-Mobile Central LLC ("T-Mobile") sued Missouri municipalities for refund of certain tax payments that it had paid under protest and filed ten separate lawsuits seeking to recoup tax payments made within ten specific time periods. Appellees brought ten separate class action suits against T-Mobile in state court for passing the contested tax onto customers and sought to recover any money that the Missouri municipalities refunded to T-Mobile. At issue was whether the district court had jurisdiction under the Class Action Fairness Act ("CAFA"), 28 U.S.C. 1332(d)(6), to remand the ten class actions to the state court from which they were removed. The court affirmed the judgment of the district court and held that there was no indication that appellees artificially divided the lawsuit to avoid the CAFA where the structure of appellees' class actions exactly mirrored the underlying ten lawsuits brought by T-Mobile and were driven by T-Mobile's own litigation decisions.