It is looking like plaintiffs’ class action lawyers may end up empty-handed after nearly four years of litigation against SuperValu based on a data breach of SuperValu’s credit card processing system caused by malicious hackersThe bottom line: the plaintiffs’ lawyers were apparently unable to find a single customer who can establish that he or she lost money as a result of the massive data breach. And this after the unauthorized and illegal access to cardholders’ “personal identifying information” (that is, their names, account numbers, expiration dates, card verification value (“CVV”) codes, and personal identification numbers (“PINs”)) in more than 1,000 grocery stores.
Although this comes after nearly four years of litigation, the court’s electronic court file has only 24 entries so perhaps there were not thousands of plaintiffs’ lawyers’ uncompensated hours invested in this ultimately worthless lawsuit (assuming the plaintiffs’ lawyers do not succeed on a second trip to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit).