Troutman Pepper Obtains Significant Victory in Data Breach Class Action

May 14 2024

Troutman Pepper is defending Blackbaud, a leading cloud software company serving social good community organizations, in a large and protracted federal litigation following a security breach due to a ransomware attack in 2020, including defeating class certification of a consolidated class action litigation. Following a 2020 data breach, multiple class action lawsuits were filed against Blackbaud across the country, leading to the centralization of the litigation in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina by the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multi-District Litigation (MDL). In total 29 cases and 90 causes of action were transferred into the MDL.

On May 14, 2024, the team persuaded the court to reject class certification in the consolidated lawsuit, ruling in favor of Blackbaud on the grounds that plaintiffs failed to show that class members could be “readily identified” administratively under the federal ascertainability standard. Defeating class certification was significant, as this class may have consisted of roughly 1.5 billion patients, donors, and other individuals.

Notably, this matter will help define the role and responsibilities of third-party service providers for various statutory and common law claims (e.g., CCPA) and the class certifications issues for data breach and privacy cases generally.

The team on this matter is led by Ronald Raether and includes dozens of other professionals, including Tambry L. Bradford, Rachel M. Buck, Joshua Davey, David N. Anthony, Melissa A. Chuderewicz, Harrison S. Kelly, Robert A. Jenkin, Edgar Vargas, Cindy D. Hanson, Sadia Mirza, Timothy St. George, Angelo A. Stio, Ryan Strasser, Andrick J. Zeen, Noah J. DiPasquale, Bonnie Gill, Allison J. Ordonez, Natalia A. Jacobo, Mackenzie W. J. Jessup, Dascher L. Pasco, Amy P. Williams, Julie H. Smith, Molly DiRago, Daniel J. Prichard, Christopher M. Brolley, Noel B. Ix, Ashley L. Taylor, Daniel R. Walz, Sean T.H. Dutton, Whitney L. Shephard, Peter S. Cox, Alexander G. Crump, Tom M. Blatcher, Andrea C. Hoy, Jonathan P. Floyd, Sophia N. Dauria, Matthew R. Cali, Barry H. Boise, Jason Lichter, Dan Lynch, Brad Williams, Tom Huffman, Adam Smith, Stephen Simmons, and many others.