Hunton & Williams To Receive 2016 Burton Award for Legal Writing

Hunton & Williams LLP announces the firm will receive the 2016 Distinguished Legal Writing Award from The Burton Foundation for an article coauthored by Jamie Zysk Isani and Jason B. Sherry, “The Ascendancy of Ascertainability as a Threshold Requirement for Certification,” published in the May 18, 2015 issue of Bloomberg BNA’s Class Action Litigation Report. Isani and Sherry are members of the firm’s nationally recognized litigation department.

In the article, Isani and Sherry assess trends in federal court decisions resulting from the surge in class action litigation involving low-dollar consumer products since Congress enacted the 2005 Class Action Fairness Act. In many cases, consumers cannot be identified from the defendant’s records, raising an issue as to whether class membership is ascertainable. Isani and Sherry trace the origin of the ascertainability requirement under Rule 23 to a pair of decades-old federal appellate decisions, analyze the polarizing 2013 decision in Carrera v. Bayer Corp. and subsequent appellate decisions, and predict how federal courts will analyze the ascertainability requirement in consumer class actions going forward.

The Burton Foundation is a nonprofit volunteer, academic organization concentrating on legal writing. In association with the US Library of Congress and its Law Library, the foundation recognizes excellence in legal writing each year by selecting only 30 law firms from 1,000 entries submitted by the nation’s largest and most prestigious law firms.