July 19, 2024
Eric Kafka of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC has secured major client wins in high-dollar consumer protection cases, including a recent $40 million settlement for advertising purchasers in a case over Facebook’s alleged inflation of advertising performance metrics, earning him a spot among the class action law practitioners under age 40 honored by Law360 as Rising Stars.
The most interesting case he’s worked on lately:
Kafka worked on LLE One LLC et al. v. Facebook Inc., in which Facebook agreed to pay $40 million to settle litigation in California federal court alleging it misled a proposed class of advertisers about how much time users spend watching paid video ads by using inflated video-viewing metrics.
“It was an interesting case because it implicated cutting-edge technological issues,” Kafka said, adding that “one of the things that makes class actions as a whole so interesting to litigate is that as technology progresses, the type of work and the subject matter of our cases naturally progresses.”
Cases such as this allow him to engage with questions about “the engineering side of how the company operates.” He cited the fact that he gets to work with experts on a range of subject matters to do things like quantify damages for the alleged misconduct.
“I’ve been blessed to work with absolutely brilliant experts who work in economics or computer science who are leaders in their fields but also have ability to communicate with lay people,” Kafka said.
The biggest case he’s worked on:
The biggest case Kafka worked on is still in the midst of litigation, DZ Reserve et al. v. Meta Platforms Inc., in which a class of Facebook advertisers claim they were deceived about the company’s “potential reach” metric.
“We allege that Potential Reach was shown to every advertiser who purchased Facebook ads on Ads Manager, and that Potential Reach is an important metric to advertisers,” Kafka said.
He added that, “while I have represented plaintiffs litigating the whole spectrum of consumer class actions, I have also developed a particularly deep expertise litigating against Big Tech companies.”
Why he chose to go into class action law:
Kafka said class actions are a “very important tool to vindicate the rights that would never be vindicated individually,” offering a quote from former Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner: “The realistic alternative to a class action is not 17 million individual suits, but zero individual suits, as only a lunatic or a fanatic sues for $30.”
“I feel a tremendous obligation to the class or putative class to give them the best representation possible,” Kafka said.
He added that he viewed it as an area “that was both important and challenging” and said going into this field of law is an opportunity to “vindicate the rights of individuals in a landscape where courts were providing more scrutiny to plaintiffs’ claims than they had 20 years or thirty years beforehand.”
How he thinks the practice and the legal industry will change in the next 10 years:
“I think that class action law is well-suited to continue to play a very positive role in vindicating the rights of individuals and deterring corporate misconduct,” Kafka said.
Kafka said that while it is true that there is more scrutiny of class action claims and class certification bids, he sees himself as part “of a rising generation of plaintiff class action litigators who are finding ways to certify classes and represent their clients within the current legal framework.” Although people may see slightly fewer class actions than before, he said, one of his goals is “finding the right cases that are pointing to true problems that need to be solved and then litigating them very robustly.”