TrendWatch: Oregon’s Unlawful Trades Practices Act (UTPA)

Transcript

Misha Isaak
Partner, Litigation

I have worked with clients on several cases that are consumer class actions brought on Oregon's Unlawful Trade Practices Act. And the claims in those cases are very often grounded in the allegation that our business client has made some misrepresentation in, for instance, their sale of a product to consumers.

The story is always more complicated and nuanced than the plaintiff's complaint reflects. And that is a very quickly evolving area of the law in the Oregon State courts in terms of what does a plaintiff have to prove in a class action in order to bring a claim in an Oregon UTPA class action type case. So the big evolving question right now that the Oregon Court of Appeals and the Oregon Supreme Court have been addressing in various ways in various cases has to do with the extent to which a plaintiff bringing a claim under the Oregon UTPA has to actually show that they were personally injured as a result of what they are alleging is a misrepresentation. So in other words, if the allegation is, well, you were advertising your product based upon a misrepresentation about the product's features, did the plaintiff bringing the claim even know about that representation when they bought the product? Do they have to establish in the case that they bought the product in reliance on what they're claiming was a misrepresentation. And that is a really hard question that Oregon courts are grappling with right now.