Bob Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle had this article in yesterday's paper on the Court of Appeal's opinion last week in Law Offices of Mathew Higbee v. Expungement Assistance Services, ___ Cal.App.4th ___ (Mar. 14, 2013).
Higbee is a UCL competitor action and the opinion is quite interesting. From the article:
A state appeals court has reinstated a lawyer's suit against a company offering cut-rate legal services, ruling that - despite a voter-approved law limiting unfair-competition suits - a business that's being undercut by a rival's practices can still seek redress in court.
I will have more on the opinion in a later post.
The federal courts have taken a different approach to this issue. Anza v. ideal Supply Co., 547 U.S. 451 (2006); Sybersound Records v. UAV Corp., 517 F.3d 1137 (9th Cir. 2008).
The Higbee approach raises all sorts of questions-- if there are hundreds of competitors in an industry, and one of them is cutting its prices because it's not complying with some statute, does every other competitor have standing?
Posted by: Elliot Silverman | Tuesday, March 19, 2013 at 01:33 PM
The cases you cite are inapposite. Anza was not a UCL case, and Sybersound didn't address any of the issues raised in Higbee.
For more on Sybersound, see my original post on the opinion.
Posted by: Kimberly A. Kralowec | Tuesday, March 19, 2013 at 07:29 PM