NEW ORLEANS — In the latest of multiple rulings in which the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has reversed course from its prior precedent and proceeded to bar arbitration of Louisiana hurricane insurance disputes following new Louisiana Supreme Court precedent, a panel on Feb. 4 issued a per curiam unpublished opinion affirming the vacatur of a previous order compelling arbitration of insurance and bad faith claims arising out of hurricane damage to a hotel.

NEW YORK — A New York federal judge on Feb. 4, who previously refused to certify a consumer class action against two companies that sell “Puff Bar”-brand synthetic nicotine vapes, ordered the companies to pay more than $96,000 in statutory damages and roughly $32,000 in attorney fees for deceptively marketing their products to the plaintiff in violation of New York and New Jersey consumer protection laws.

ATLANTA — A federal jury in Georgia returned a defense verdict in the first bellwether case for the Paragard intrauterine device (IUD) multidistrict litigation, rejecting a woman’s claim that Teva Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. failed to warn her that the device is prone to break during removal.

NEW YORK — The Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Feb. 3 affirmed a lower court ruling granting injunctive relief to GEICO in its Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) no-fault fraud suit against medical providers, finding that the lower court did not abuse its discretion in staying the providers’ state court proceedings seeking more than $2 million in judgments against GEICO.

ST. LOUIS — Giving an employer an outlier victory in a putative class action that is similar to many other recent Employee Retirement Income Security Act challenges to tobacco surcharges, a Missouri federal judge on Feb. 3 dismissed the complaint with prejudice and said the statute at issue “does not impose a retroactive reimbursement requirement for tobacco cessation surcharges."

NEW YORK — The Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Feb. 3 affirmed a lower federal court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of primary and excess professional liability insurers, holding that a fee exclusion bars coverage for a financial services company insured’s liability in two underlying class actions alleging that certain mortgage loan fees were unlawful and the insured was derivatively liable under the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act.

SAN FRANCISCO — A divided California Supreme Court clarified that while an employment contract’s format is generally irrelevant to the substantive unconscionability analysis that focuses on the fairness of the terms, “courts must closely scrutinize the terms of difficult-to-read contracts for unfairness or one-sidedness,” remanding for further consideration a lower court’s ruling that small, barely readable print supports findings of substantive and procedural unconscionability in the case of a former Nissan employee who sued for wrongful termination after signing such an agreement.

FRANKFORT, Ky. — In an unpublished opinion, a split Kentucky appeals panel reversed and remanded a ruling against the third-party administrator of a short-term disability (STD) plan in a long-running case where a jury awarded the claimant $7,125,000 in emotional distress and punitive damages