Sony Hacking Class Action Lawsuit Reaches Settlement

[Audrey McNeil <audrey () riskbasedsecurity com>]

http://deadline.com/2015/09/sony-hacking-lawsuit-settlement-employees-identity-theft-1201513280/

Ten months after the studio was ripped apart by a massive hack attack and
thousands of employees’ personal information ended up exposed online, Sony
Pictures has reached a tentative deal to end the lawsuits stemming from the
breach.

“On September 1, 2015, Plaintiffs and SPE reached an agreement in principle
to settle all of the claims of the putative class against SPE, subject to
final documentation, which will be submitted for the Court’s approval in
accordance,” said a filing today from the plaintiffs’ lawyers (read it
here). No details of the settlement were made public. A motion from former
Sony employees Ella Carline Archibeque, Marcela Bailey, Michael Corona,
Joshua Forster, Michael Levine, Christina Mathis, Steven Shapiro and
Geoffrey Springer seeking preliminary approval of the agreement will be
made by October 19.

A class certification hearing in the disputed legal action is scheduled for
September 14; Sony had pushed back hard in filings on August 24 against
such certification. The studio claimed the plaintiffs would be hard-pressed
to prove any of the information out on the web that was now potentially
damaging to them actually came out of the Sony hack of last November. Both
sides have now asked the court to push such dates and deadlines for 45 days
pending the proposed settlement and its formal approval.

Less than a month after the gutting November 24 hack, Corona and Mathis
were the first to hit Sony with lawsuits, on December 15 last year. The
North Korean-originated invasion over the studio’s distribution of The
Interview pic saw the studio’s security systems broken open, and among
executive correspondence and other industry details, the exposure revealed
personal information for an estimated 3,000 former and current Sony
employees. One of the many reverberations of the deep hack was the exiting
of Amy Pascal earlier this year as co-chairman of Sony Pictures
Entertainment and chairman of the Motion Picture Group.

With the settlement proposal, it now looks like the anniversary of the hack
will see it at least partially becoming a bad memory for Sony and less an
open wound.

A battalion of attorneys from several firms have repped the various
plaintiffs in the case, with Cari Laufenberg of Seattle’s Keller Rohrback
LLP as a de facto leader. Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale And Dorr LLP are
representing Sony.

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