Andrew N. Friedman

Anyone who bought an ad on Facebook or Instagram saw the number. In Ads Manager, beside the targeting choices, a line labeled "Potential Reach" told the advertiser how many people the ad could reach. Cain Maxwell, who sold firearm mounts online under the name Max Martialis, saw it when he spent about $400 on eleven campaigns between September 2018 and May 2019. DZ Reserve, an online retailer, saw it across 740 campaigns and more than $1 million in a single year. The number counted accounts, and accounts are more numerous than people: businesses have them, people keep duplicates, and some are fake. The plaintiffs' expert put the inflation at a third or more for a default audience. In one internal comparison, the reach Meta asserted for eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-olds in Chicago ran roughly four hundred percent above the number of account holders in that group, and one employee wrote that the company had reported revenue it "should have never made."

Friedman is class counsel for the advertisers. He came to consumer litigation by an unusual door: after Tufts and George Washington University Law School, he worked as a lawyer at the Patent and Trademark Office, and in 1985 he joined Cohen Milstein in Washington, where he later co-chaired the Consumer Protection practice and is now Of Counsel. The technology in his cases has changed every few years. The question he puts to it has stayed the same.

Two Courts, Seven Years

DZ Reserve and Maxwell sued in the Northern District of California in 2018, for every United States advertiser shown a Potential Reach of a thousand or more since August 15, 2014. Judge James Donato certified the class on March 29, 2022. Meta appealed, and on March 21, 2024, the Ninth Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Sidney R. Thomas, affirmed the damages class. Substituting accounts for people was a single misrepresentation made to every advertiser, the court held, and the reliance and materiality questions that Meta said would splinter the class could be answered for all of it at once: "The class action mechanism would be impotent if a defendant could escape much of his potential liability for fraud by simply altering the wording or format of his misrepresentations across the class of victims." The Supreme Court denied Meta's petition on January 13, 2025, and Judge Donato set a jury trial for October 14, 2025.

Weeks before trial, Meta moved to compel arbitration for every class member who had bought ads between May 25, 2018 and October 27, 2021, under commercial terms that had taken effect on the first of those dates. The trial date was vacated on October 6. On December 2, 2025, Judge Donato denied the motion. Meta had filed 471 docket entries in the case and had mentioned arbitration exactly once; it had, he wrote, "waged a seven-year campaign of litigating this case in two federal courts" while staying silent about the agreement, and waiver did not require the advertisers to show they had been prejudiced by the delay. Meta appealed the waiver ruling, the district court stayed the case, and the appeal was fully briefed in the Ninth Circuit in April 2026.

Seventy-Eight Million Eight Hundred Thousand

The Anthem breach began with e-mail. In 2014, employees of the health insurer received messages built to look ordinary; a link in each installed a back door. By October and November of that year the intruders were mapping Anthem's enterprise data warehouse, and in January 2015 they moved its contents out as encrypted archives, routed through a chain of computers to China, and deleted the archives behind them. Anthem disclosed the intrusion on February 4, 2015. By February 24 the count of people whose names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, addresses and health identification numbers had been taken stood at 78.8 million. In May 2019 a federal grand jury in Indianapolis indicted a Chinese national, Fujie Wang, for the intrusion.

The consumer suits, seventeen at first and more than a hundred later, were consolidated before Judge Lucy H. Koh in San Jose in June 2015, and Friedman was appointed co-lead counsel. The settlement she approved in August 2018 was $115 million, then the largest in a data-breach case: $17 million for at least two years of credit monitoring, $13 million in cash for people who already had monitoring, $15 million for out-of-pocket losses, and three years of data-security commitments by Anthem, including encryption of sensitive data. "We got a tremendous result, and it was not by accident," Friedman told Law360 afterward. "We worked really, really hard." He went on to the plaintiffs' steering committee in the Equifax litigation, where he co-chaired the expert committee and the resolution provided up to $425 million in consumer benefits and required $1 billion in security spending; to co-lead counsel for the consumer plaintiffs in the Marriott litigation over the long-running intrusion into Starwood's guest-reservation database; and to co-lead counsel in the MGM Resorts litigation, where a federal court approved a $45 million settlement on June 18, 2025 for breaches disclosed in 2019 and 2023.

Sixty to Eighty Percent

The other Facebook case concerned the average watch time the company reported for video ads from 2015 into 2016, a figure that an error in the calculation had pushed up. When the Wall Street Journal reported the error in September 2016, Facebook put the overstatement at sixty to eighty percent and said it had found the problem about a month earlier. The amended complaint, drawing on the company's own documents, put the inflation at 150 to 900 percent, said engineers had known since 2015, and quoted an internal discussion of how to "obfuscate the fact that we screwed up the math." Cohen Milstein was co-class counsel, and Judge Jeffrey S. White approved a $40 million settlement on June 26, 2020 for advertisers who had bought video ads between February 15, 2015 and September 23, 2016.

Khoday v. Symantec was about a box that checked itself. When customers bought Norton software online, an add-on called Extended Download Service or Norton Download Insurance, priced between $5.99 and $10.99, was placed in the cart automatically and presented as the way to re-download the software later. Customers could re-download without paying, the complaint alleged, and the sellers kept that from them. Friedman was lead counsel. Judge John Tunheim in Minnesota certified a national class on March 31, 2014, and on April 22, 2016, a month before the trial date, approved a $60 million all-cash settlement that paid $50 for each purchase. The same year Friedman was co-lead counsel in the $60 million settlement over Caterpillar diesel engines with defective emissions systems, and he later worked on the Apple device-performance litigation that produced a settlement fund of up to $500 million for owners of slowed iPhones.

Exactly Once

Maxwell's shop closed in 2019 when he ran out of inventory. DZ Reserve no longer operates. The class they represent, every advertiser shown a Potential Reach of a thousand or more in the last twelve years, has a certified damages claim, an appellate opinion affirming it, a denial of review from the Supreme Court and a waiver ruling that counted Meta's docket entries. What it does not yet have is the trial. That waits on the Ninth Circuit and one question: whether a company that litigated a case for seven years may, weeks before trial, send most of the class to arbitration.