OAKLAND, Calif. (Legal Newsline) - Class action lawyers won't be punished for bringing a lawsuit against Subway that alleged its tuna was a sort-of "mystery meat," but they have dropped their case.
California federal judge Jon Tigar on Aug. 4 granted plaintiff Nilima Amin's motion to dismiss her own lawsuit, which accused Subway of pushing "a mixture of various concoctions that do not constitute tuna."
Tigar refused Subway's motion for sanctions that accused attorney Mark Lanier and others of pursuing a meritless case. They filed three amended complaints during the two years the lawsuit was pending.
"Subway has not persuaded the Court that the requested sanctions are appropriate under either Section 1927 or the Court's inherent authority," Tigar wrote.
"First, Amin's claims, at least in part, survived a motion to dismiss. Second, and more importantly, Subway's pre-lawsuit and March and April 2021 letters challenging the merits of Amin's claims are insufficient to demonstrate that Amin's counsel knowingly or recklessly pursued her claims."
Subway ultimately provided documents that showed its tuna is real, adding records detailing "the exact location in the ocean where the fish were caught."
"Over two years after they filed this class action alleging fabricated and reckless claims that Subway's tuna is not tuna, the plaintiff's lawyers across four law firms seek to abandon the lawsuit now that they are being forced to actually prove their allegations," Subway's lawyers wrote.
"Counsel had more than ample opportunity to conduct due diligence and withdraw this meritless lawsuit at the pleading stage, well before it proceeded to discovery and class certification."
Subway said it debunked the various theories in early 2021 and warned that it would seek sanctions if the lawyers continued to file amended complaints, of which there were ultimately three.
It calls the lawyers tactics "bad faith litigation" that caused Subway to incur $617,000 in attorneys fees, plus other various costs. It also suffered harm to its business and goodwill and public ridicule as a result of media coverage, it says.
But Tigar rejected the notion the case was pursued in bad faith, noting lawyers put the tuna through scientific testing that said the majority of it contained no detectable sequences of tuna DNA.
"While Subway's evidence to the contrary may ultimately have proven more persuasive, the Court cannot conclude that Subway's evidence made it 'obvious' that Amin's claims were meritless or frivolous," Tigar wrote.
Subway claimed plaintiffs lawyers failed to meet deadlines repeatedly but Tigar said the company only argued in its motion that sanctions were warranted from the simple pursuit of the lawsuit.