Tom Field of BankInfoSecurity.com has an interesting interview with Richard Coffman, the Texas attorney who filed the first class action lawsuit against Heartland Payment Systems (HPY). Coffman represents banks and financial institutions suing HPY.
One of the more intriguing aspects of the interview has to do with why Coffman thinks that banks and financial institutions will fare any better against HPY than they did when they sued TJX and were denied class action status. Coffman didn’t really explain how he sees the HPY situation as being different than the TJX case, but says:
I can say that the banks initially did not fair well in that case [TJX]for several reasons, none of which exist in this case in my opinion.
Although I have been following the bank’s side of that TJX litigation closely, it is interesting to note that the First Circuit Court of Appeals just breathed new life into the bank’s side of the case with a ruling in March of this year, and has now sent the bank case back down to the federal district court in Boston with the directive to look at class certification all over again.
The district court initially denied class certification for the financial institutions in that litigation, again for reasons that I don’t believe exist in the Heartland case, but even with that denial the district court has now been directed to look at it one more time.
Undoubtedly, there’s a long way to go on these lawsuits.