Rachel Geman

Acquisition Before Training

An artificial-intelligence company can possess the same book through legally different routes: one copy bought and scanned, another downloaded from a pirate library. That distinction became decisive in Bartz v. Anthropic. In June 2025, the court held that using books to train large language models was fair use and that digitizing purchased print books as internal library replacements was also fair use. It refused, however, to excuse the acquisition and retention of pirated library copies on that basis. Rachel Geman served as court-appointed co-lead class counsel for the authors.

The remaining acquisition claims led to a $1.5 billion settlement, which received final approval on July 20, 2026. The fund established a classwide process for covered works. Geman’s assignment required attention to the history of each copy, the ownership of each covered work, and a claims process capable of reaching authors and other rightsholders across decades of publishing.

Consent at the Interface

Plaid occupied a different handoff. Its technology connected consumer bank accounts to financial applications. The complaint alleged that versions of the Plaid Link interface appeared to consumers like their banks’ login screens even though users were providing credentials to Plaid, and that Plaid obtained more financial data than an application needed or a user authorized. Geman served as one of the lawyers appointed to represent the class.

The court granted final approval to the Plaid settlement on July 20, 2022. Plaid funded a $58 million settlement and agreed to nonmonetary terms addressing data deletion, minimization, disclosures, retention, and tools for managing account connections. Those provisions followed the path of the alleged conduct. Alongside compensation, the remedy addressed what the interface told users, which information Plaid kept, and how a person could later disconnect an application or delete stored data.

Charges in the Servicing Record

Mortgage servicing presents another record problem: which events justify a fee, what the underlying vendor charged, and what a borrower’s account history shows. In Evans v. Select Portfolio Servicing, Inc., borrowers allege that SPS imposed unlawful pay-to-pay, property-inspection, and late fees, including inspection charges exceeding the amounts billed by vendors. On September 3, 2026, the federal court certified a nationwide Fair Debt Collection Practices Act class, a nationwide breach-of-contract class, and an alternative multistate good-faith-and-fair-dealing class. The court appointed Geman co-lead class counsel.

Evaluation Inside the Workplace

Information becomes consequential again when an employer turns evaluations into pay and promotion decisions. In the Goldman Sachs gender litigation, Geman represented a certified class of women in professional roles who challenged the firm’s evaluation and promotion systems. The litigation resolved in 2023 through a $215 million settlement and agreed changes to employment practices.

Other matters place the same question in different systems. Geman represented employee-benefit plans in litigation over a concealed coding error in AXA Rosenberg’s quantitative investment model; a $65 million class settlement received approval in 2012. As co-lead counsel for the City of Philadelphia, she worked on Fair Housing Act claims against Wells Fargo that ended in 2019 with $10 million for city housing programs and other relief. In 2024, she was appointed co-lead class counsel in a settled forced-labor case for approximately 200 Colombian workers and workers of Colombian origin.

Certification to the Government

False Claims Act work changes the recipient of the representation but not the need to test it against an underlying record. In a cybersecurity matter involving Raytheon and businesses later acquired by Nightwing, Geman represented the whistleblower whose suit preceded an $8.4 million federal settlement in 2025. The government alleged that required cybersecurity controls and a system security plan were missing from an internal system used in work on twenty-nine Defense Department contracts and subcontracts.

The case concerned what contractors had promised the government about protecting covered information and their compliance with those requirements. Geman now chairs Lieff Cabraser’s Whistleblower Law/False Claims Act practice group, where an insider’s account must be connected to contracts, invoices, technical requirements, and the government’s payment decision.

In another False Claims Act matter, Geman and co-counsel represented a whistleblower whose allegations concerned New York tax deductions taken by Fareportal and affiliated online-travel businesses. A May 2026 settlement required the defendants to pay $4.5 million to resolve the state’s claims.

One Process, Many Claimants

Geman earned an A.B., cum laude, from Harvard University in 1993 and a J.D. from Columbia Law School in 1997. At Columbia, she was a Stone Scholar, Equal Justice America Fellow, Human Rights Fellow, and an editor of the Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems. She is a partner in Lieff Cabraser’s New York office. Her professional service has included the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York Rules Committee, the Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund, and employee-side labor and employment committees.

A book still has an author and an acquisition history; a bank connection still belongs to a consumer; a servicing fee still has a borrower and a charge history; an evaluation still affects one worker; a government claim still rests on particular systems, contracts, or tax records. Geman’s practice links those individual records to the repeated institutional process behind them. That is how a dispute involving many claimants can remain exact about the right, representation, or promise each one brings to the case.