USC Gould Professor Adam Zimmerman’s groundbreaking research on class actions supported veterans with disabilities
What started as a computer glitch resulted in a collective effort to assist thousands of U.S. veterans, as leading law experts — including USC Gould School of Law Professor Adam Zimmerman — submitted amicus briefs in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to support plaintiffs in Freund v. McDonough.
The court in August ruled that more than 3,000 veterans could have their disability claims — which had been improperly closed because of a massive computer glitch — reinstated and reconsidered as part of a class-action lawsuit.
“This is a problem because most veterans who are trying to apply for disability or other benefits don’t have lawyers,” said Zimmerman, the Robert Kingsley Professor of Law at USC Gould. “Here, their cases had been closed with no explanation as to why. Many veterans without lawyers were left in the dark and had no idea how to respond to all of that. Class actions exist to help many people, who otherwise could not afford a lawyer, band together to get legal representation. However, an administrative court held it did not have power to hear them, even though every veteran suffered precisely the same injury.”
In order to right this wrong, a group of lawyers from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP decided to represent these veterans pro bono in order to reinstate the disability claims. While the VA wanted to address each veteran’s claim individually, the lawsuit argued that all of the veterans should be considered as a group in a class action. “The fear was that, if the veterans’ claims weren’t reinstated all together, most of their individual appeals for benefits would just fall through the cracks.”
As a leading expert in mass tort law, Zimmerman’s research focuses on how people benefit when agencies like the VA use class action procedures to hear large numbers of claims. The federal government adopted Zimmerman’s recommendations to permit class actions in administrative hearings, like this veterans court, based on his 2017 Yale Law Journal article with Michael Sant’Ambrogio, “Inside the Agency Class Action.”
“Courts like the Veterans Court and other administrative bodies should have the flexibility to hear claims brought by groups of people,” he said.
Zimmerman’s “agency class actions” have already expanded into other areas, such as student debt relief.
When a college or university commits widespread fraud, or falls into bankruptcy, the Department of Education may receive thousands of claims for debt relief from students who attended the same institution. Pulling from Zimmerman’s research, the Department of Education designed a process where it could “simply hear a collection of claims from students all at that one same school, and then provide relief for all of them,” he said. Just last year, for example, the Biden-Harris Administration approved a $130 million “group discharge” for 7,400 borrowers from CollegeAmerica, following a multi-year investigation. He added that fields like immigration and health care for the elderly can also benefit from these types of class actions and collective procedures.
For the Freund v. McDonough case and others, the results could not have been possible without a collective effort in the name of justice. “I’m just one of many people that, from my academic ivory tower, is shedding a light on the problems that people face when they need to stand up to the government together,” Zimmerman said. “So, these kinds of collective victories for veterans in Freund would not have been possible without the collective talent and work of many others.”
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