Rafey S. Balabanian

The App’s Two Lives

Every app has a face it shows the user and a life it lives underneath. There is the screen — the install button, the permission prompt, the cheerful interface — and there is everything running beneath it: background collection, transmission to servers the user has never heard of, and the conversion of a voice or location into data that outlives the moment it was captured. Rafey S. Balabanian litigates the distance between the two. His cases reconstruct the technical path — installation, permission, transmission, retention, use — and ask whether consent gathered at the surface ever reached the conduct occurring underneath.

His practice treats code, call logs, and biometric templates as records of corporate behavior that no individual user could audit alone. Balabanian joined Edelson PC in 2008 and now serves as a partner, chief financial officer, and board member. He has been appointed lead class counsel in more than two dozen state and federal class actions, building a docket at the junction of software, privacy, and consumer law.

From Misdemeanor Court to Privacy Litigation

Balabanian’s route into that work ran through the trial courtroom. After earning a B.A. in history with distinction from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2002 and a J.D. from DePaul University College of Law in 2005, he began his career as a prosecutor for the City of Chicago and took part in dozens of trials. A stint at a Chicago litigation boutique followed before he joined Edelson.

That trial formation shaped how he approached privacy litigation. Terms of service and expert reports can make the field seem abstract; Balabanian builds cases around concrete conduct, provable data flows, and damages a jury can count. He is admitted in California and Illinois, in the Ninth and Seventh Circuits, and in federal district courts around the country. He has also guest lectured at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law on privacy and class actions.

Certifying the comScore Class

The comScore litigation announced the method. Consumers alleged that analytics software bundled into free downloads collected information from their computers beyond what the installation process disclosed. As co-lead counsel, Balabanian argued that automation supplied the common proof: the software behaved the same way across machines. The federal court in Chicago certified a contested privacy class, and the litigation resolved for $14 million with prospective restrictions on the challenged data-collection program.

Computer forensics and the law of assent meet in that sequence. The question in comScore — whether installation disclosures authorized what the software did after entering a device — recurs across Balabanian’s privacy work. The technical record supplies both the alleged conduct and the means of proving it at class scale.

The Machinery of 1.85 Million Calls

His Telephone Consumer Protection Act work applies the same discipline to automated communication. As lead counsel in Kolinek v. Walgreen Company, he resolved claims over automated prescription-notification calls for $11 million. As lead counsel in Wright v. Nationstar Mortgage, he secured a $12.1 million settlement over automated mortgage-servicing calls. Dialers, consent data, account fields, and vendor relationships became evidence for classwide claims.

Wakefield v. ViSalus went to a federal jury in Oregon. The jury found that ViSalus had made 1,850,440 prerecorded calls in violation of the TCPA, and the district court entered roughly $925 million in statutory damages. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit affirmed liability, vacated the damages award, and remanded for constitutional reduction proceedings. The procedural split matters: the liability finding remained in place, while the aggregate damages question returned to the district court.

The Voice as an Identifier

Balabanian’s biometric work begins at the moment a human trait becomes a data asset. In Hopwood v. Nuance Communications, consumers alleged that their voices had been converted into reusable voiceprints without the notice and consent Illinois law requires. The litigation resolved for $9 million, with individual class members eligible for payments exceeding $10,000.

The portfolio holds together through its evidence. Whether the artifact is tracking software, a dialing campaign, or a voiceprint database, Balabanian’s cases insist that a company’s systems can be reconstructed packet by packet and call by call, then tested in court. Technical uniformity becomes the bridge between an experience scattered across millions of devices and a claim that can proceed for a class.

Balabanian describes his results as collective work. Lawyers, technologists, and experts reconstruct what the software did; class members provide the scale that no single user could assemble. His own formulation is simpler: he can’t do it all on his own. The cases apply that lesson twice — inside the litigation team and across the class whose shared record makes hidden conduct visible.