Dec 20 (Reuters) - For litigators in big-ticket cases, 2021 was a year of a restoration after the pandemic stretched the bounds of normalcy in 2020.
There were still plenty of glitches – just ask inadvertent cat impersonator Rod Ponton -- but courthouses reopened, juries returned and litigators learned to cope with mask requirements. To borrow what has become a hotly-debated phrase in post-Covid Delaware M&A cases, 2021 still wasn’t exactly the ordinary course of business. It was a lot more ordinary, though, than 2020.
COVID also seems to have subsided as a source of commercial litigation, though we’re still in the midst of crucial litigation over the power of state and federal governments to respond (or not) to COVID-19. Litigation over business interruption insurance claims is ongoing, but federal appellate courts have sided with insurers. Securities class action observers, meanwhile, shifted their attention from COVID-19, which didn’t engender the predicted tsunami of lawsuits, to SPACs.
The tentative resurgence of normalcy is an apt description for the most significant trend I detected this year in high-stakes business litigation: Corporate defendants continued to chip away at plaintiffs’ ability to sue them, especially en masse. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last June in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez is the most obvious example. The court held, as you know, that the risk of injury is insufficient to establish plaintiffs’ constitutional right to sue. The decision ...
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