Another of the hundreds of class action lawsuits pending against employers in Illinois under a stringent state biometrics privacy law has settled, netting the lawyers who led the effort about $54,000 in fees and the class members less than $100,000 total.
According to Cook County court documents, plaintiffs represented by the Chicago class action law firm of Stephan Zouras LLP have agreed to end their two-year-old legal action against Northbrook-based lighting manufacturer ConTech Lighting and Bloomingdale-based Leviton Manufacturing.
The plaintiffs, led by named plaintiff Linda Kane, had filed suit against ConTech and Leviton in September 2018, accusing the companies of allegedly violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA.)
According to the lawsuit, Kane had worked for ConTech from 2005-2018 as an accounts receivable representative.
In the complaint, Kane accused the companies of requiring her and other employees to scan their “hand geometry” to verify their identity when punching in and out of work shifts and track their hours worked. The lawsuit asserted the companies did not first secure written authorization from the workers before requiring the so-called biometric scans, nor did the companies provide workers with notices allegedly required by the BIPA law concerning how the companies would save, use, share and ultimately destroy the scanned handprints.
The lawsuit asserts those alleged actions violated the Illinois BIPA law, and put the companies on the hook to pay potentially large damages, as allowed under the state law.
The lawsuit against ConTech and Leviton was very similar to hundreds of other such class actions filed against employers in Illinois in recent years under the BIPA law. Under Illinois Supreme Court precedent, plaintiffs do not need to prove they were actually harmed by the alleged scans of their biometric data in order to sue. Rather, they need only demonstrate their employer or another business simply failed to abide by the BIPA law’s technical provisions.
Since that decision, class actions under BIPA have flooded courts in Cook County and elsewhere in Illinois by the hundreds and thousands, mostly targeting employers. On its website, Stephan Zouras boasts of currently litigating more than 100 such class actions alone.
Under the law, employers and other defendants accused of violating BIPA could face damages of $1,000-$5,000 per violation. Parties involved in such BIPA cases have said the law could be interpreted to define a “violation” as each time an employee punched the clock, potentially exposing employers to potentially crippling damages in the millions or even billions of dollars, depending on the number of employees.
In the case against ConTech and Leviton, however, after two years of court proceedings, the plaintiffs agreed to settle the case against the employers for $164,400, according to court documents.
In August, Cook County Circuit Judge Eve M. Reilly granted a request to allow the plaintiffs’ attorneys from the Stephan Zouras firm to claim more than $55,000 of that total to cover fees and costs.
A settlement administrator, Rust Consulting Inc., will get $9,600 more.
And the judge said Kane herself can claim $10,000 of the settlement as a “service award” for her role in moving the case forward against her employer.
This would leave $89,800 to be divided up among 137 other ConTech and Leviton employees included in the plaintiffs’ class, equating to about $655 each.
Judge Reilly called the settlement “fair, reasonable and adequate, and in the best interests of” the ConTech workers included in the plaintiffs’ class.
According to Cook County court records, ConTech and Leviton have been represented by attorneys with the firm of Jackson Lewis P.C., of Chicago.
The lawsuit also named as defendants two vendors who provided time clock tech services to the employers. The firm of Stephan Zouras has filed class action lawsuits specifically against both vendors, Kronos Inc. and ADP, on behalf of workers throughout the state whose employees used biometric time clocks provided by the two vendors.
The vendors have claimed those lawsuits are an attempt to make them pay unfairly for the actions taken by employers who use the devices they provide.
To date, judges have refused Kronos’ and ADP’s attempts to get those lawsuits tossed, and those lawsuits remain pending.