Edelson PC is dedicated to representing vulnerable communities in high-impact cases, leveraging both the firm’s resources and creative approach to secure real wins for people facing the hardest circumstances. Both the firm generally and the Public Impact Group litigate these cases.
Representative matters include:
- Representing members of the Rohingya community, a Muslim minority in Myanmar, who are refugees in the United States after they were driven from their homes by a genocide. Doe v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 2022-cv-00051 (N.D. Cal.). The suit seeks $150 billion in damages from Meta for prioritizing anti-Rohingya hate speech on the Facebook platform and fueling the genocide.
- After hackers exfiltrated the genetic ancestry information of nearly 7 million people from 23andMe, the hackers highlighted listed of Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people on posts on the Dark Web, looking for buyers most likely to be interested in harming these vulnerable groups—as Congressman Josh Gottheimer put it, posing the threat of “domestic extremism.” The firm filed the first class action focused on the exceptional harms posed to those populations and the Dark Web. See Melvin v. 23andMe, Inc., 24-cv-00487 (N.D. Cal.).
- In Ali v. Bitsmedia, the firm represents users of the application MuslimPro, which—among other things—assists users in finding the qibla, the direction of Mecca for prayer. 23-CH-09478 (Cir. Ct. Cook Cty.) The developer of MuslimPro, Plaintiff alleges, leveraged the location data to compile detailed dossiers of the movements of its millions of Muslim users and sold them to data brokers, including government contractors.
- Representing injured survivors and surviving family members of the mass shooting at Highland Park, Illinois July 4th parade in 2022. Two of the firm’s partners live in Highland Park, and both were attending the parade with their families. The suit alleges that Smith & Wesson’s marketing of the M&P 15 rifle (an AR-15 style rifle) used in the shooting specifically targeted, attracted, and enabled troubled young men with a focus on militaristic and first-person-shooter imagery in its marketing—by marketing the rifle as suitable for offensive, military-style missions, the suit alleges that Smith & Wesson inspired and magnified the warped worldview of the shooter. Turnipseed v. Smith & Wesson, Inc., 22-cv-06359 (N.D. Ill.).
- Edelson PC is co-counsel with Yale Law School’s Veterans Legal Services Clinic in a historic class action suit aimed at rectifying racial prejudice and long-standing bias by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs towards Black veterans. The suit alleges that these practices date back to 1945, when discrimination against Black veterans with respect to housing, education and disability benefits began with the postwar G.I. Bill. The named plaintiffs—a Black veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps who served in Vietnam and the National Veterans Council for Legal Redress—defeated the government’s motion to dismiss and the action is moving into discovery. See Monk v. United States, 22-cv-1503 (SRU) (D. Ct.).