The Price of Modern Gold: Why Tom Loeser is Expanding Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy’s Technology Group’s Offices in Seattle

Did you speed up in your brand-new Corvette? Of course you did. And it’s going to cost you.

If you ask Tom Loeser, data is the gold of our modern era, and Americans are smack dab in the middle of the wild west in this new mining frontier. The rules are barely being formed, let alone enforced. This is precisely why Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy’s Technology Group is expanding their offices to Seattle under the leadership of Loeser and his partner, Karin Swope.

Seattle is, after all, where many major tech companies are headquartered. The view from Loeser’s office window boasts the home bases of companies like Amazon and Zillow and offices of Microsoft, Meta, and other tech behemoths he is facing off with on behalf of consumers. Loeser sees this proximity as a strength. Newly nestled in the neighborhood, the attorneys at Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy are right in the middle of the action.

If their incredible caseload is any indication, there’s no better place for this new arm of the firm to be. They’ve had no shortage of work since opening their doors a year ago. So how does the boutique firm stand so strong against these titans?

Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy represents people or entities in cases involving only just principles or causes. The firm is known for its trial prowess and the breadth of its practice and the diversity of its clients: CPM attorneys are experienced in state and federal false claims matters, antitrust law, securities actions, employment law, consumer class actions, and personal injury cases, among other practice areas. The Seattle cohort, however, has more of a concentrated niche – firmly focused on pursuing complex technology-related class actions.

“The firm’s overriding mission is standing up for the little guy,” says Loeser. “And making changes happen.”

In a recent case against General Motors, Loeser links the carmaker’s shady data sharing practices with OnStar in-vehicle tech and draws a line to a misrepresentation that is hugely disturbing to consumers. The case exposes the companies for tracking drivers and selling the hijacked data to credit reporting agencies who sold it to insurers. Insurers, in turn, are jacking up rates based upon consumers behaviors and tendencies behind the wheel.

It's just one example of the types of tech-driven cases the attorneys in the Seattle office are focused on. And no matter the changing tides of the administration or other geopolitical forces, work protecting consumers from corporate overreach remains booming.

“When the economy's great, corporations are taking advantage of consumers and cheating people,” says Loeser. “And when the economy's terrible, corporations are taking advantage of consumers and cheating people.”

With a winning combination of top-tier talent and tech savvy on their side, Loeser and the Cotchett team are working to help fight the corporate giants and establish some law and order for this under-governed digital era.

Lawdragon: Congratulations on opening the new office in Seattle! What was behind the launch?

Tom Loeser: Thank you. Our firm’s main office is in Burlingame, just outside of San Francisco. They handle a broad spectrum of plaintiffs’ rights cases. Everything from injury to malpractice to antitrust, environmental and employment cases. In Seattle, we're the technology arm. Our practice here for the most part, focuses on nationwide class actions that involve complex legal matters or complex technologies or both.

The Seattle market is important to the firm because young technologically savvy lawyers want to be here. Being in Seattle means we can offer talented lawyers – with interests in technology and a moral compass – an opportunity to do something other than help businesses cheat, which is what many corporate litigation lawyers do. Sorry, but this side of the v., we see things a little differently.

We've been appointed to leadership positions in several large technology centered cases providing us with a lot of work to do. This business isn't nearly as cyclical as it is on the defense side where corporations may increase or decrease retention of outside litigation teams depending on their good fortunes. When the economy's great, corporations are taking advantage of consumers and cheating people and when the economy's terrible, corporations are taking advantage of consumers and cheating people.

Our office has grown from one lawyer a year ago with Karin, who started the office in 2021. I came onboard last March and we’ve since grown the office to five lawyers, and we’re hiring. Our plan is for continued growth.

LD: Tell us about the team.

TL: Karin and I have been in this line of work a long time – between us, over 50 years. Interestingly, we both grew up in Seattle, and we knew each other in grade school. Karin has an expertise in intellectual property, which adds another facet to our technology practice. Two of our lawyers are junior lawyers, recent University of Washington graduates with technology-related backgrounds who are committed to our mission of standing up for the little guy. A more senior associate came to us after having been a prosecutor in Brooklyn and having spent two years at the ACLU working on reproductive rights in Mississippi. We're really excited about our team and their commitment to the cause and their willingness to learn while deep in litigation against the biggest corporate defense firms in the world.

There is a never-ending stream of corporations doing really bad things to consumers in search of profits. Our job is to stop those practices.

LD: How do you approach the challenge of rivaling big, well-resourced corporations?

TL: There is a never-ending stream of corporations doing really bad things to consumers in search of profits. Our job is to stop those practices. So the most important thing is to be able to muster the talent to take on the armies of lawyers that these corporations have. Meta, for example, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has so much money that they can employ 500 lawyers to defend their actions of scraping data and using it to their advantage without paying you a penny for it. In order to fight that practice, you need an efficient team of high caliber attorneys because if we don't win, we don't get paid. There's an old saying in our practice, corporate defense lawyers get paid per hour, plaintiffs’ class lawyers get paid perhaps. We have to be really selective in the cases we bring and make sure they're directed at practices that everyone agrees need to stop. It could be a four-year slog, we're not going to see a penny until and unless we prevail and even then, a judge is going to decide what’s reasonable and how much we get paid under the circumstances.

LD: What are your recruitment strategies?

TL: I went to Duke and my co-managing partner Karin went to Columbia, and the vast majority of our classmates now defend corporations. The path out of the T14 schools is largely populated by Big Law who come and visit and start recruiting graduates as early as their first semester. In the plaintiffs’ sector, we look for young lawyers with PNW roots, some technology chops, and the overdeveloped sense of right and wrong that I have been accused many times of having. We also look for “Big Law refugees.” These are talented lawyers who have spent a few years at a Big Law firm, have been trained extremely well, but they feel their highest and best purpose isn't defending these corporations. We offer them an opportunity to be on the side of the little guy, helping folks to get a fair shake in our consumer marketplace. In the last 30 years, the government's role in protecting the individual and consumers has shrunk tremendously. So it really falls upon plaintiffs’ class action lawyers to draw a line and call out bad behavior.

LD: What was your path to plaintiffs’ class actions?

TL: It was long and winding. I was an undergraduate physics major at Middlebury College in Vermont, then after a few years chasing waves and snow, I completed a technology MBA at the University of Washington. I worked as a Treasury intern at Microsoft, then with my MBA I worked at Hewlett Packard in California for two years before heading to law school in Durham. After law school, I went back to Silicon Valley, where I worked in technology law for two years before I was appointed a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles. I became a cyber prosecutor – I was in the computer crimes and intellectual property section. We would criminally prosecute people involved in hacking, data theft, corporate espionage, human trafficking, satellite piracy – things that involved technology. Coming out of that practice, I knew that I wasn't going to be able to defend corporations. I was very fortunate to have spent 16 years at Hagens Berman, working for and among really great lawyers before getting the opportunity to help create this new technology-focused practice at CPM. I've been a technology lawyer for 25 years now and this is the place where I feel that I can do the most good for everyday people.

LD: What types of cases are you taking on?

TL: In a nutshell, corporate monetization of private information and abuse of consumers through emerging technologies. We have a leadership role in a big privacy case against General Motors and OnStar. The case concerns these GM vehicles that had OnStar and were tracking your driving. Not just where you went, which is bad enough, but also whether you pressed on the accelerator firmly, whether you slammed on the brakes hard, what part of town you were in, whether it was late at night – things of that nature. They originally said they did it to build a better car or to help you learn to drive better. However, they warehoused that data and sold it to LexisNexis and Verisk – big credit reporting agencies and data collection companies – that then turned around and sold it to the insurers so they could raise people's rates.

Now, who buys a car thinking they're purchasing a product that's going to spy on them everywhere they go? It's outrageous.

We have clients whose insurance rates doubled and they had no idea why. So they called their insurer and found out that they’d pulled a new credit report that contained information that caused them to raise their rates. Our clients ordered their credit report, which contained 300 pages of their driving data. They lived in a rural part of the country and they had an early morning drive to see family where there would often be deer in the road. On more than one occasion, they would have to brake hard to ensure they didn't run into a deer. They never had an accident, they never were charged with speeding or anything else, but they’re now considered to be unsafe drivers because they slammed on their brakes to avoid hitting animals in the road, and their rates go up.

A retired couple had a really nice Corvette – a fun car to drive. Typically when you have a Corvette, you would expect somebody to accelerate quickly. That’s the whole point. Well, that information is tracked and gets sold to the credit reporting agency. It shows up, flagged on their insurance report – if somebody accelerates quickly and brakes hard, we don't want to insure that person or we're going to insure them, but we're going to charge them more.

Now, who buys a car thinking they're purchasing a product that's going to spy on them everywhere they go? It's outrageous. The companies say they disclosed it via a click-through, but the evidence also suggests that GM was actually paying its sales people a bonus when people signed up for this. There is evidence that the salespeople would click-through all the screens before they'd ever deliver the car to the person. The dealer would set up the OnStar and the customer was none-the-wiser. Even the people who canceled their OnStar subscriptions, the evidence suggests they were still being tracked.

We also have leadership positions in massive data breach cases against T-Mobile and AT&T. The FTC has published guidance to companies telling them the minimum standards they should employ for securing people's data. It should be encrypted so if it's stolen, nobody can use it. It should be minimized – don't keep what you don't need. Data of customers who are no longer your customers, should be gotten rid of so it can’t get lost. When companies don't take these steps, they are at least negligent because they know better. There are thousands of data breaches each year, many of which could have been avoided, or at least minimized in their effect on consumers if these corporations, whose profits depend on consumer data, would just devote a little bigger piece of those profits to data security.

LD: Is this misuse of data a common theme in your cases?

TL: Yes, the privacy cases we’re seeing right now are all about sharing or using data in a manner that's not expected. There's lots of cutting-edge cases in that regard. Some we’re not involved in include doctor’s websites which ask about your medical symptoms and provide you with feedback and advice. A pixel, or its equivalent, on that website can take that data and share it with Facebook or Twitter or TikTok. Most people feel like if they want to share something with Facebook, they’ll do it themselves. They don’t want some other company providing their information – especially medical information.

We just filed a new case here in Seattle against Amazon that alleges its adware Software Development Kit (SDK) systematically tracks the movements and location of millions of Americans. SDKs are software packages that Big Tech companies like Amazon license to smartphone application creators to build their apps and allow them to serve advertisements. But the Amazon Ads SDK is alleged to have had another secret purpose. The complaint alleges that in the background, and unknown to the smartphone user, Amazon was collecting and exfiltrating geolocation data. This could include where we live, work, worship, play, even our doctor visits. Amazon is allegedly using this information to enhance its targeted advertising, selling its ability to identify each of us and our private characteristics.

You’re seeing a lot of cases with these unexpected relationships concerning your data. Data is the gold of the digital age. I remember reading articles suggesting that making cars is Tesla's side hustle, and what they're really doing is collecting information because they track what every one of those cars does everywhere. It wouldn't shock me at all if billboards soon change to reflect the interests of the person driving by. They know who we are based on our data. And now they want to know when and where we go throughout every day.

The privacy realm is really important, especially because our government is way behind in doing anything to protect it.

The privacy realm is really important, especially because our government is way behind in doing anything to protect it. It’s different in Europe – they’ve gone a long way towards offering people ownership of their data and rights with respect to their data. The government here just hasn't even begun to do anything, so it's really been the wild west for the last 15 years. The question now is, can we claw it back? Once you spill ink into the pond, it's hard to ever contain it again. At this stage, the best we can do is try to change behavior by making the continued abuse of an individual's information expensive – that's really what we do. We make it expensive for companies to continue to abuse and cheat consumers either out of their money or out of their data.

LD: What are some the biggest challenges you face with these cases?

TL: The biggest hurdle in our consumer cases is forced arbitration clauses. They're really a travesty in the marketplace. Arbitration was originally conceived as a way for savvy businesses with attorneys to avoid the costs of a public trial. But now we have these cases that have gone all the way up to the Supreme Court, for example, AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, regarding cell phone services' onboarding process. They had a service agreement that the consumer has no control over and can't negotiate or change, and that agreement has an arbitration clause and it's “take it or leave it.” Even if every other cellular company has the same arbitration clause, so a consumer really has no choice at all, the Supreme Court held that the consumer is still making a choice to agree to arbitration and therefore can't bring a lawsuit. This is something that has been a topic in government over the last few years, and there was a push to try to have these consumer-facing arbitration clauses deemed illegal or ineffective, but The Chamber of Commerce, which is the lobbying arm of the world’s biggest corporations, did an excellent job of preventing that from happening. It's unfortunate because consumer class actions are really the last defense that consumers have when the government is not policing the corporations. These forced arbitration clauses make it very difficult and very expensive for us to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough.

LD: Tell us a bit about the new office.

TL: We’re in a great 1930s Art Deco building and we designed our space to be a collegial working space for our team. Generally, we go to our clients and they rarely visit us here, so we have a very practical, easy workspace with a nice common area. We're a small team, we don't need to have silos, we work together, we learn together. We prosecute these cases together. We are on the edge of the downtown core of Seattle, near South Lake Union, which is really in the heart of where the technology companies have made their homes. When I look out my window, I see the Amazon towers and there are definitely things Amazon has done over the past few years which have harmed consumers. We're working to put a stop to those practices. I don't know that the folks in those towers would be happy to know that we're right here staring at them – maybe that’s how the wolves feel on seeing the sheep dogs hiding in the flock.