Andre M. Mura
Privacy · Consumer Protection
Consumers did not deserve for their personal information to be treated so recklessly.
Thirty-Nine Weeks
On October 30, 2006, Deborah Watts, thirty-nine weeks pregnant, went to a clinic run by Cox Medical Centers with cramping and less movement from the baby than she was used to, and the cesarean delivery that followed was not begun until 10:45 a.m. Her son Naython was born with brain injuries he will carry for the rest of his life. A Missouri jury found the care negligent and put two figures on it: $3.371 million for the medical care he would need and $1.45 million for what the injuries had taken from him beyond the bills. A state statute then cut the second figure to $350,000, and the trial court spread the first across a payment schedule that ran fifty years at an interest rate the family said would never cover the care. Andre M. Mura, then senior litigation counsel at the Center for Constitutional Litigation in Washington, took the appeal to the Supreme Court of Missouri with Roger Johnson of Joplin and argued that the amount of a plaintiff's damages is a fact the jury finds, that the state constitution says the right to trial by jury shall remain inviolate, and that a cap the court must apply after the verdict takes that finding away from the jury that made it. On July 31, 2012, by four votes to three, Chief Justice Richard Teitelman's opinion agreed, overruled the court's own 1992 decision upholding the cap, and sent the payment schedule back with an instruction that the new one ensure Naython receives the benefit of the jury's award.
Ninety-Six Percent
CashCall's signature loan was $2,600, unsecured, repaid over forty-two months at 96 percent a year and, from July 2009, at 135 percent, to borrowers the federal district court described as consumers with low credit scores living under financial stress. Eduardo De La Torre's class action, De La Torre v. CashCall, filed in the Northern District of California in 2008, alleged that the rate made the loans unconscionable and so unlawful under the state's finance-lender law; CashCall answered that California had set no numerical ceiling on loans of $2,500 or more and that a court could not supply one. Summary judgment went to CashCall in the district court, and in April 2017 the Ninth Circuit asked the Supreme Court of California whether the rate on such a loan could ever render it unconscionable. Mura, by then at Gibbs Law Group in Oakland with Steven Tindall, took a leading part in the briefing, and on August 13, 2018 the court answered unanimously, in an opinion by Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, that it could: whether a rate is unconscionable is "fundamentally a different inquiry than whether the rate exceeds a numerical cap," and removing a cap does not make a rate immune. Having decided the rule, the court left the loans themselves to be judged, so De La Torre refiled the claim in San Mateo County Superior Court on March 7, 2019 with the limitations period tolled back to 2008. Tindall and Mura were among the class counsel the San Mateo court appointed, and after a bench trial at which it found that CashCall's default rate held at 35 to 40 percent whatever interest it charged, judgment was entered on August 31, 2023 for $245,515,389 in restitution to 119,844 borrowers on 133,848 loans. On February 27, 2026 the Court of Appeal affirmed it.
Mixed in the Reservoirs
San Diego charged its single-family water customers by tier, and the cost-of-service studies behind the rates justified the higher tiers on the premise that the cheapest water the city had, the supply from its own reservoirs, served the lowest tier of household use while the more expensive water bought from the county water authority served the rest. Daniel Patz and Joan Mann Chesner sued in 2015 for every single-family customer served after August 21, 2014, a class the court certified in June 2019, and Mura, as lead trial counsel in Patz v. City of San Diego, tested the premise against the utility itself. Local and imported water were mixed in the city's reservoirs before delivery; the city's expert acknowledged at trial that local supply could not cover all first-tier use and was not delivered only to those customers; the multipliers the city applied for peak demand rested on no time-of-use data showing which customers drove the peaks. Under the limits California's voters wrote into the state constitution in 1996, a property may not be charged more than its proportional cost of service, and on September 13, 2021, after the liability phase of the trial, the court ruled that the tiers had not been shown to meet that standard; the remedies phase produced a judgment of $79.5 million in 2022. Mura defended the judgment in the Court of Appeal, which affirmed it on July 30, 2025, one justice dissenting, and sent the case back for the effect of a 2024 statute on the remedy; after a settlement in principle, the city authorized a $40 million settlement on September 2, 2026, with a final-approval hearing set for December 11, 2026, and has proposed to bill its customers on a single rate from 2027. The same team's case against the Otay Water District, tried to a decision in March 2021, produced a liability finding the Court of Appeal affirmed on July 15, 2024 and a $12 million settlement, preliminarily approved, for the district's single-family customers from July 2014 through 2022.
Law and Briefing
Judge M. Casey Rodgers placed Mura on the plaintiffs' law-and-briefing committee in the Combat Arms earplug litigation in Pensacola, more than 260,000 claims by service members and veterans who alleged that a standard-issue earplug had failed to protect their hearing, and he sat on bellwether trial teams that won verdicts; in sixteen bellwether trials juries found for the plaintiffs in ten and awarded about $265 million before 3M agreed on August 29, 2023 to pay $6.01 billion over six years. In the Taxotere litigation in New Orleans he serves on the plaintiffs' steering committee and co-chairs law and briefing for breast-cancer survivors who allege that the chemotherapy drug left them permanently without hair. He was a member of the trial team in the two-week trial of the first bellwether, Barbara Earnest's case, in September 2019, and after the jury found for Sanofi he obtained, on February 10, 2022, a unanimous decision of the Fifth Circuit that Sanofi had presented a company physician's analysis of its own clinical trial as lay opinion, had a retained expert repeat it, and had then told the jury that her whole case failed because of it; the court ordered a new trial.
He took his bachelor's degree at Williams College in 2000 and his law degree at the George Washington University Law School in 2004, went to the Center for Constitutional Litigation to represent plaintiffs in state supreme courts and the federal courts of appeals against legislative and doctrinal limits on civil remedies, and joined Gibbs Law Group in Oakland, where he became a partner in 2015; in 2025 the firm took his name, Gibbs Mura, A Law Group. He is admitted in California and the District of Columbia. He teaches class actions, discovery and legal writing, including pretrial writing for newer lawyers, sits on the boards of the Impact Fund, which finances public-interest class actions, and Berkeley Law's Civil Justice Research Initiative, is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a member of the National Center for State Courts' Lawyers Committee, chaired the American Association for Justice's LGBT Caucus, was a trustee of the National College of Advocacy, and has been president of the National Civil Justice Institute, the research and education organization devoted to access to civil justice, whose symposium with Stanford Law School on secrecy and transparency in civil litigation he addressed on May 1 and 2, 2026.
Consent After Prominent Notice
Vizio's smart televisions were recording what was on the screen. The complaints consolidated before Judge Josephine Staton in Santa Ana alleged that about sixteen million sets connected to the internet between February 1, 2014 and February 6, 2017 had collected viewing histories and digital identifiers and that Vizio had sold them to advertisers and data brokers without the owners' knowledge or consent. Mura argued the motion to dismiss for the plaintiffs, and in 2017 Judge Staton rejected Vizio's position that the Video Privacy Protection Act does not reach a maker of televisions. As co-lead counsel for the settlement class with Eric Gibbs he negotiated the terms the court preliminarily approved on January 4, 2019 and finally approved on July 31: a $17 million fund, deletion of the viewing data Vizio had collected, and no further collection unless the viewer consents after a prominent notice. "After years of intensive litigation, we are pleased to present the Court with a nationwide class action settlement that is restorative," he said. "$17 million is more than the revenue Vizio obtained from licensing viewing data during this three-year period, and the changes that Vizio is making and recently made to its business put consumers in the driver's seat when it comes to their viewing data."
Cat Brooks and Rasheed Shabazz, two Oakland activists, sued Thomson Reuters in 2020 over CLEAR, the platform through which the company sold access to profiles assembled from Californians' addresses, associations, photographs and other records gathered without their knowledge or consent. Judge Edward M. Chen certified the class in Brooks v. Thomson Reuters, the Ninth Circuit declined Thomson Reuters's request to review the certification on November 17, 2023, and Mura and Geoffrey Graber of Cohen Milstein, whom the court appointed class counsel, negotiated the settlement it preliminarily approved on October 11, 2024 and finally approved on February 21, 2025: $27.5 million for people who had lived in California at any time since December 3, 2016, and changes to the product itself, a public website explaining CLEAR, default reports that leave out or limit a person's relatives, associates, licensed drivers and property, and a working way for a person to review and remove their own information. In the Lenovo adware case he briefed and argued the motion to dismiss and the motion that certified a nationwide class for damages, and the case settled for $8.3 million. When First American's website exposed hundreds of millions of title and mortgage records in 2019, he said that consumers did not deserve for their personal information to be treated so recklessly.
On December 21, 2022, Judge William H. Orrick appointed him to the plaintiffs' executive committee in the consolidated Meta Pixel healthcare litigation, choosing the group for experience the judge called highly relevant; the patients allege that a tracking tool installed on hospital websites and inside password-protected portals sent what they did there to Meta without consent, and in the briefing on class certification Mura argued for the patients that every class member reasonably expected that their providers would not use tools that shared health information paired with data identifying them. In the social-media adolescent-addiction litigation, before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland with a coordinated proceeding in Los Angeles, the court appointed him to the plaintiffs' steering committee leadership, where he runs law and briefing and manages discovery against the TikTok defendants; the first case tried, in Los Angeles, ended on March 25, 2026 in a $6 million verdict against Meta and YouTube, and the first federal trial, brought by state attorneys general, opened on August 18, 2026. In each privacy settlement he has negotiated, the money came with a second remedy: the viewing data deleted, the default report narrowed, the next collection made to wait for consent.
