Despite a lead plaintiff with unique injuries, the Northern District of Indiana recently certified a class seeking economic damages under Indiana’s consumer protection statute in a case challenging contaminated hand sanitizer manufactured by 4e Brands North America, LLC.  Callantine v. 4e Brands North America, LLC, 2024 WL 4903361 (N.D. Ind. Nov. 27, 2024). 

In June 2020, Defendant 4e voluntarily recalled all of its hand sanitizer lots due to the presence of methanol.  The plaintifffiled a class action lawsuit two months later, alleging that she had suffered both economic and personal injuries, and that she was entitled to statutory damages.  The individual class members’ damages, however, would be “largely limited to statutory damages.” 

As a result, 4e argued that the lead plaintiff’s additional injuries defeated Rule 23’s typicality, adequacy, and predominance requirements.  Nonetheless, the Court certified the class, with the availability of statutory damages playing a prominent role in the Court’s reasoning. 

The Court found that the plaintiff was a typical and adequate representative for a class seeking statutory damages even though she also sought damages for her economic and personal injuries because “one would expect many class members to have some mix of economic and health-related injuries.”  The Court reasoned that the plaintiff’s allegations that she suffered statutory, economic, and personal injuries “cover[ed] those of the entire proposed class—i.e., those of members who suffered one, two, or all three types of harms.”  The availability of statutory damages further defeated 4e’s attempts to argue that individual issues predominated over common ones, because assessing damages “is essentially determined by one’s membership in the class” and thus is “susceptible to measurement across the entire class.”