Cepelak v. HP Inc.

Background

The plaintiffs sought certification of eight classes across four states. They proposed, for each state, damages classes under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(b)(3) consisting of buyers of any HP printer. They alleged that HP printers use color ink when printing documents that appear to be black and white or grayscale. They also sought certification of those classes for injunctive relief under Rule 23(b)(2), or alternatively certification of issue classes under Rule 23(c)(4), with damages to be determined later.

The plaintiffs also proposed injunctive-relief classes consisting of buyers of 28 HP printer models that stop all printing when any ink cartridge is empty. They called the two groups the “underprinting” classes and the “print-to-stop” classes.

Court’s reasoning

A class action must present at least one question of law or fact that can be answered for the entire class and is central to the claims. The court concluded that the underprinting classes did not meet that requirement. The proposed classes covered a wide range of printers, settings, software, and documents, and the behavior of a particular configuration could vary depending on the document being printed.

The court also said that the legal issues—including materiality, HP’s duty to disclose, reliance, and damages—would likely vary among different groups of buyers. The plaintiffs’ use of “underprinting” as an umbrella term for several printer behaviors meant that the proposed factual questions—whether the printers underprinted, whether HP knew and concealed that conduct, and whether class members were damaged—could not be resolved on a classwide basis. The court therefore declined to certify the underprinting damages classes, injunctive-relief classes, or issue classes.

The court held that three of the four print-to-stop classes could not be certified because the named plaintiffs had never owned a print-to-stop printer. Without owning a covered printer, those plaintiffs were not members of the proposed classes and were not typical representatives. The court declined to conditionally certify those classes and replace the named plaintiffs later.

John Cepelak, the California named plaintiff, had owned a print-to-stop printer. But the court found that his deposition testimony made him an atypical representative. Cepelak indicated that he liked the print-to-stop feature, did not want a printer with low ink to continue printing if doing so produced streaky text, and preferred not to use a black-ink-only mode because he considered its output lower quality. The court reasoned that he did not appear to have been injured by the print-to-stop behavior. The court also noted that he appeared to face problems proving reliance based on the circumstances of his printer purchase, and that his printer manual stated that the printer was not designed to print using only the black cartridge when the color cartridges were out of ink.

In a footnote, the court expressed skepticism that the plaintiffs could present a classwide damages model. It said their model did not attempt to measure damages for the entire class and relied on each class member’s recollection and assertion about how often print jobs should have used color ink.

Disposition

The court denied class certification for all proposed classes. It did not state in this order whether the denial was with prejudice. The court scheduled a further case-management conference and directed the parties to address whether the denial should be with prejudice and, if not, whether the plaintiffs should receive leave to substitute new named plaintiffs.