Andrew N. Friedman

Andrew N. Friedman has spent four decades representing consumers in class actions against companies whose products, services, or data practices allegedly failed in a common way. His docket has ranged from advertising metrics and software services to defective engines and some of the country’s largest data breaches. That work requires matching a company’s representations to its own records, then determining whether the same proof can answer the claims of a class rather than one claimant at a time.

Friedman graduated magna cum laude from Tufts University in 1980 and earned his J.D. from George Washington University Law School in 1983. He began his legal career at the United States Patent and Trademark Office and entered class-action practice in 1985. At Cohen Milstein he later became co-chair of the Consumer Protection practice. He is now Of Counsel and the practice’s immediate past co-chair, continuing to work on the firm’s consumer and technology litigation.

The Anatomy of a Breach Case

Data-breach litigation shows both sides of Friedman’s approach to relief: compensation for what has already happened and changes aimed at reducing the chance that it happens again. When hackers penetrated Anthem, they obtained personal information belonging to 78.8 million people, including names, birth dates and Social Security numbers. Friedman was court-appointed co-lead plaintiffs’ counsel. The resulting $115 million settlement was, at the time, the largest data-breach settlement in American history and combined monetary relief and identity-protection benefits with cybersecurity commitments governing how Anthem would protect customer information.

Friedman later served on the plaintiffs’ steering committee and co-chaired the expert committee in the Equifax litigation arising from the credit bureau’s 2017 breach. That resolution provided up to $425 million in consumer benefits and required Equifax to spend $1 billion on security and technology upgrades. His practice also included the MGM Resorts data-breach litigation, where a federal court granted final approval on June 18, 2025 to a $45 million global settlement covering breaches disclosed in 2019 and 2023.

The Marriott litigation has taken a less linear course. Friedman was appointed consumer plaintiffs’ co-lead counsel in the multidistrict litigation over the long-running intrusion into Starwood’s guest-reservation database. The district court initially certified multiple damages and issue classes, and after a 2023 appellate remand it recertified them. On June 3, 2025, however, the Fourth Circuit reversed that recertification, holding that the Starwood Preferred Guest Program’s class-action waiver was valid and enforceable and also reversing the related issue classes against Accenture. That ruling changed the class posture; it did not erase the underlying MDL, which the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation continued to list as pending in August 2026.

What Did the Product Promise?

Friedman’s consumer cases outside the breach field ask a closely related question: did the product or service perform as purchasers were led to expect? In Khoday v. Symantec and Digital River, he was lead counsel for consumers who paid for a service that allowed them to re-download Norton software. The case settled one month before trial for $60 million in cash. In LLE One v. Facebook, Cohen Milstein served as co-lead counsel for advertisers who alleged that Facebook inflated metrics associated with video advertising; the court approved a $40 million settlement in 2020.

The continuing DZ Reserve v. Meta Platforms litigation has required a different kind of persistence. Friedman is class counsel for advertisers challenging Meta’s “Potential Reach” metric. On March 21, 2024, the Ninth Circuit affirmed certification of the damages class, while vacating an injunction class for further consideration of standing. The Supreme Court denied Meta’s petition for review on January 13, 2025. A jury trial was then set for October 14, 2025, but weeks before trial Meta moved to compel arbitration of many class members’ claims. U.S. District Judge James Donato denied that motion on December 2, 2025, finding that Meta had waived arbitration after years of litigation. Meta appealed, and the district court stayed the case pending that interlocutory appeal. The Ninth Circuit appeal was fully briefed in April 2026.

Friedman has also worked on the Apple device-performance litigation, where consumers who alleged that software updates slowed certain iPhones obtained a settlement fund of up to $500 million, and served as co-lead counsel in litigation over Caterpillar diesel engines with allegedly defective emissions systems, resolved for $60 million. The object being tested changes — a download service, an advertising metric, a phone, an engine — but the evidentiary question remains concrete. Friedman compares what was sold with what purchasers actually received.

The Work Between the Milestones

Settlement figures and certification orders are the visible moments in a class action. Much of Friedman’s work happens between them: coordinating experts and co-counsel, testing a company’s internal records against its public representations, defending common proof through appellate review, and preserving viable consumer claims when the procedural posture changes. His technology cases require enough technical fluency to question how a platform counts users or how a company secures a database. The technical work serves a straightforward legal task: establish what the company did, whom it affected, and whether the proof can be tested for a class.

Since entering class-action practice in 1985, Friedman has remained on the consumer side. His roles have ranged from co-leading breach cases and organizing expert work to negotiating settlements and defending class certification on appeal. The technology changes from case to case; the job is to build a record sturdy enough to survive those procedural turns and useful enough to produce relief for the people affected.