Bank Customer Denied Class Action Status
Atlanta partner Bill Withrow was mentioned in an April 13 Daily Report article about a Georgia Court of Appeals opinion affirming the denial of class certification in a lawsuit over overdraft fees charged by SunTrust Bank.
In the five-year-old case – Bickerstaff v. SunTrust Bank –the plaintiff, SunTrust customer Jeff Bickerstaff Jr., claimed overdraft fees charged to him were unlawfully excessive. As such, his lawyers filed suit to garner class action status to prevent the practice and recoup fees – attempting to avoid a bank arbitration clause which had previously been upheld as enforceable by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in litigation also handled by the firm. Bickerstaff argued that by filing suit he had effectively rejected arbitration pursuant to a contractual right granted bank customers, and that his rejection of arbitration applied to all customers in the class.
Ultimately, the Georgia Court of Appeals agreed with a prior Fulton County Court decision in the case: “although Bickerstaff effectively opted out of the [arbitration] agreement for himself by filing suit, he could not do so on behalf of the class prior to certification and thus could not meet the class action requirement that the putative class be large enough,” the paper reported.
Atlanta lawyers Jamie Theriot, Lindsey Mann and Nick Phillips also are representing SunTrust in the proceedings.