More Illinois employers have become some of the latest targets of the growing list of class action lawsuits filed under Illinois’ biometrics information privacy law, accusing the companies of improperly requiring workers to scan their fingerprints to either track their work hours or access secure facilities, like medicine dispensers at hospitals.
From Feb. 25 to March 4, the law firms of McGuire Law; Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz; Stephan Zouras; and Beaumont Costales, all of Chicago, and Bursor & Fisher, of New York, filed a combined eight class action lawsuits in Cook County Circuit Court against 11 employers under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
All of the lawsuits generally accuse the companies of improperly requiring workers to scan their fingerprints to verify their identity when they punch the clock at the beginning and end of work shifts, or when accessing secure drug dispensing systems, before they first obtained written consent from the workers or supplied the workers with certain notices, allegedly required by the BIPA law, disclosing how the employers would collect, store, use, share and ultimately destroy the scanned fingerprint data.
The lawsuits seek damages on behalf of a large number of employees at each business.
The Beaumont Costales firm filed five of the lawsuits:
Yenny Testa v Bravo 4200 LLC, filed March 4;
Josefina Nery v Mighty Cake Company LLC, filed March 4;
Samuel Lopez v Mid-American Growers Inc., filed March 3;
Javier Santiago v Cheese Merchants of America LLC, filed March 3; and
Wesley Lumpkins v LR Development Company LLC, filed Feb. 28.
McGuire Law filed suit on March 1 against Old Town Market LLC, doing business as Plum Market, on behalf of named plaintiff and Plum Market employee Cherease Dillon.
The Wolf Haldenstein and Bursor & Fisher firms filed suit on March 3 against Londonhouse Chicago Leaseco LLC and Hilton Management LLC, on behalf of Jermaine Knox, an employee at the LondonHouse Hotel in Chicago.
Stephan Zouras filed suit on Feb. 25 against G2K Logistics and Bedford Transportation on behalf of truck drivers Keith Blunt and Equarion Gills.
The lawsuits arrive as just a few of an ever-growing roster of class action lawsuits against thousands of employers throughout Illinois under the BIPA law.
Under the BIPA law, plaintiffs are allowed to demand damages of $1,000-$5,000 per violation. Courts have interpreted the law to define individual violations as each instance in which someone’s biometrics are scanned. In employment cases, this could mean employers could be on the hook to pay up to $5,000 for each time an employee scanned a fingerprint in the workplace.
This could mean employers could face potential payouts well into the millions, if not billions of dollars, depending on the size of the company, among other factors, should an employer lose at trial.
The lawsuits have increasingly turned into settlements for plaintiffs’ lawyers, as employers have struggled to find effective defenses to either fight the allegations in court or, at least, reduce their potential payouts.
The Illinois Supreme Court has specifically declared plaintiffs do not need to prove they were actually harmed by improper collection or disclosure of their biometric data to press their potentially massive lawsuits.
More recently, the state high court and other Illinois judges have rejected efforts to classify workplace BIPA claims as workers’ compensation claims, which would send the cases to arbitration, and to limit how far in the past plaintiffs can claim damages. Plaintiffs believe they should be able to lodge claims on behalf of workers using a five year statute of limitations; defendants are seeking one- or two-year time limits. That question is still pending before the Illinois Supreme Court.
Illinois courts have also specifically declared that judges should not factor the potentially ruinous payouts faced by businesses when deciding the reach and scope of the BIPA law.