UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT RENALDO WHITE; RANDOLPH No. 22-35748 NADEAU, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated, D.C. No. 2:20-cv-01866- Plaintiffs-Appellees, MJP

v. OPINION SYMETRA ASSIGNED BENEFITS SERVICE COMPANY; SYMETRA LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY,

Defendants-Appellants.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington Marsha J. Pechman, District Judge, Presiding

Argued and Submitted October 17, 2023 Phoenix, Arizona

Filed June 20, 2024

Before: Sandra S. Ikuta, Bridget S. Bade, and Daniel A. Bress, Circuit Judges.

Opinion by Judge Bress 2 WHITE V. SYMETRA ASSIGNED BENEFITS SERVICE CO.

SUMMARY*

Class Certification

The panel reversed the district court’s certification of two nationwide classes in a putative class action of approximately 2,000 payees who received structured settlement annuities to resolve personal injury claims. Plaintiffs alleged that defendants Symetra Life Insurance Company and Symetra Assigned Benefits Service Company wrongfully induced them to cash out their annuities in individualized “factoring” arrangements, whereby they gave up their rights to periodic payments in return for discounted lump sums. Rule 23 of the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure governs class certification, and requires that questions of law or fact common to class members predominate over any questions affecting only individual members. The panel held that the district court erred in certifying the primary nationwide class, which advanced claims under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and state law. Certification was legally improper because individualized issues of causation will predominate. The record indicates that defendants’ allegedly uniform course of conduct was not as uniform as plaintiffs suggest. Even assuming defendants engaged in uniform conduct, plaintiffs have not shown there is a common question of whether such conduct improperly induced plaintiffs to enter into factoring * This summary constitutes no part of the opinion of the court. It has been prepared by court staff for the convenience of the reader. WHITE V. SYMETRA ASSIGNED BENEFITS SERVICE CO. 3

agreements to their detriment. Any assessment of whether defendants’ alleged acts and omissions caused plaintiffs to enter the factoring transactions, or led to them accepting inferior factoring deals than they otherwise would have absent the alleged misconduct, would require an analysis of each plaintiff’s individual circumstances. The panel held that the district court erred in certifying a nationwide subclass of plaintiffs whose original settlement agreements with their personal injury tortfeasors contained structured settlement annuity (SSA) anti-assignment provisions. The record indicates that the annuitants hail from a wide array of different states, and some of the settlement agreements have choice of law provisions denoting the law of a state other than the location where the contract was executed. The apparent variations in state law on the enforceability of anti-assignment provisions in SSAs and the need to apply multiple state laws to the subclass raised a substantial question of whether individual issues predominate and how the matter can be fairly managed as a class action. 4 WHITE V. SYMETRA ASSIGNED BENEFITS SERVICE CO.

COUNSEL Alison E. Chase (argued), Keller Rohrback, Santa Barbara, California; Adele A. Daniel, Sydney Read, Gretchen F. Cappio, and Lynn L. Sarko, Keller Rohrback LLP, Seattle, Washington; Edward Stone, Edward Stone Law PC, Greenwich, Connecticut; Jerome M. Marcus and Jon