District Court Must Complete A Full Daubert Analysis Before Class Certification If An Expert Opinion Is Critical To Certification
AMERICAN HONDA MOTOR CO. V. ALLEN (April 7, 2010)
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American Honda Motor Co. ("Honda") manufactures motorcycles. One such motorcycle, the Gold Wing GL1800, is the subject of a class action lawsuit. The plaintiffs, purchasers of the GL1800, allege that the motorcycle has a design defect. The defect, they allege, results in excessive shaking of the steering assembly. The plaintiffs moved for class certification. They relied on a report prepared by Mark Ezra for support for their allegation of the predominance of common issues. In his report, Ezra had developed a standard for the dissipation of steering oscillation in motorcycles. He tested one GL 1800 and concluded that it did not meet this standard. Honda argued that the report did not meet the Daubert standard. The district court expressed its concern that the standard was not supported by empirical evidence and was not generally accepted by the engineering community and that his sample size of one was inadequate. Nevertheless, it refused to strike the report and granted the motion for class certification. Honda petitioned for leave to appeal.
In their opinion, Judges Posner, Evans, and Tinder granted the petition, vacated the denial of the motion to strike and the order certifying a class, and remanded. The Court acknowledged that it had not yet considered the specific question of whether a Daubert challenge must be resolved prior to class certification. It has, however, held that a district court must make all legal and factual determinations necessary to ensure that class requirements are met. The Court thus held that a district court must conclusively resolve challenges to an expert report if the report is critical to class certification. Here, the district court started the correct analysis but never actually decided the question. Instead, it simply decided not to exclude the entire report at what it referred to as the "early stage of the proceedings." The district court abused its discretion in doing so. In fact, the Court went on to conclude that the Ezra report should have been excluded under a Daubert analysis. Applying the Daubert factors, the Court noted the lack of evidence that the standard has been generally accepted or that any tests have been performed to support it. The Court also stated that the sample size of one would rarely be sufficient to extrapolate its results to an entire fleet of motorcycles. Without the report, the plaintiffs cannot meet the predomination requirement of class certification.
