Class Certification in Employment and Labor
At NERA, we advise our clients on the entire range of economic issues that can arise in class actions alleging discrimination or wage and hour violations, including the determination of common impact on a classwide basis, proof of injury, analysis of intra-class conflict, and the feasibility of formulaic approaches to damages.
NERA's ability to go beyond the broad-brush analyses frequently presented in labor litigation allows our economists to understand whether an alleged disparity or violation pervades the proposed class, limits the class to some subgroup, or does not exist at all. Our work may include assessing whether the available data would allow such a determination, as well as understanding the drivers of observed variability in patterns of alleged violations. Often such variability suggests that apparent violations are, in fact, innocuous and result from the mechanical application of a damages formula to data that may be available from business records but cannot reliably answer the questions raised in litigation. Our experts have testified extensively on statistical issues related to Rule 23 and on whether any statistical claims are artifacts of the model an opposing expert has chosen.
