Interested Party Moves to Consolidate 2 Dozen Privacy Cases vs. Comcast, Citrix

Interested party Kenneth Hasson moved to consolidate 24 cases pending in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania against Comcast and/or Citrix involving Citrix's October data breach, said Hasson's unopposed motion Thursday (docket 2:24-cv-01198). Hasson requests that the court consolidate the two dozen actions and assign them to U.S. District Judge John Younge as the “already-assigned judge’ in 17 of the actions. The plaintiff moves to establish his case, the first-filed Hasson v. Comcast Cable Communications (docket 2:23-cv-05039), as the master docket for the consolidated cases. The cited rule 42(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure provides that when several actions involving common questions of law or fact are pending before a court, it's authorized to consolidate the actions to avoid unnecessary costs or delay, said the motion. The 24 cases involve an “array of shared common questions of law and fact" against defendants Comcast and/or Citrix on behalf of overlapping putative nationwide classes arising out of the breach by cybercriminals of internal Comcast systems and customer data, including plaintiffs’ personally identifiable information, which allegedly occurred because of a vulnerability in an on-premises Citrix product used by Comcast, said the motion. Litigation of the Comcast actions will require resolution of seven common issues: the cause, extent and scope of the data breach; defendants’ investigations into the breach; communications between Comcast and Citrix about the breach; defendants’ data security measures before the breach; actions taken to remedy the incident and the data security “deficiencies that led to it”; contractual obligations between the defendants; the adequacy of the notice of the breach; and harm stemming from it, the motion said. The motion proposed a standing order that any action subsequently filed, transferred or removed to the court that arises out of the same or similar operative facts as the consolidated action be consolidated with it for all pretrial purposes. Hasson proposes an order that plaintiffs file a single consolidated complaint no later than 45 days after an order appointing interim lead counsel is entered, it said. All parties support the request for consolidation. Hasson filed a reply in support for transfer and centralization of cases before the Panel on Multidistrict Litigation in February (see 2402050030).