-
Northern District Of Illinois Denies Class Certification In No Poach Case
06/30/2026On June 10, 2026, Judge Sunil R. Harjani of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois denied a motion for class certification from former healthcare employees claiming that their wages were suppressed by alleged no-poach agreements. The Court concluded that plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that common questions would predominate over individualized questions and failed to show predominance of common issues to assess antitrust impact and damages. In re Outpatient Medical Center Employee Antitrust Litigation, No. 1:21-cv-00305 (N.D. Ill. Jun. 10, 2026).
Plaintiffs sought to represent a putative class of more than 6,000 senior-level employees from the three defendant outpatient medical centers. Plaintiffs alleged that, starting in 2008, defendants allegedly reached agreements not to recruit senior-level employees from each other. These “no poach” agreements allegedly barred defendants from recruiting director-level and above positions from each other and required applicants to inform their supervisors when applying to another defendant. Plaintiffs asserted that the alleged no-poach agreements suppressed employee compensation and limited employee mobility in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. Plaintiffs also alleged that defendants illegally exchanged competitively sensitive employee compensation information as part of the agreements.
To certify a class, Plaintiffs must satisfy the requirements of Rule 23(a)—numerosity, commonality, typicality, and adequacy of representation—and one of the Rule 23(b) subsections. In this case, plaintiffs asserted the putative class met the requirements of Rule 23(b)(3). Defendants did not challenge that the Rule 23(a) requirements were met, but rather that plaintiffs did not meet the burden to successfully certify the class under Rule 23(b)(3). For Rule 23(b)(3), “[p]redominance is satisfied when common questions represent a significant aspect of a case and can be resolved for all members of a class in a single adjudication.” Kleen Prods. LLC v. Int’l Paper Co., 831 F.3d 919, 923 (7th Cir. 2016). In order to secure class certification, plaintiffs needed to demonstrate a method of proof common to all class members and that this method would predominate to show that the class suffered antitrust injury.
Plaintiffs sought to prove common impact by showing (1) the alleged no poach agreements and sharing of compensation information caused injury in the form of wage suppression, and that (2) the wage suppression had a common and widespread impact across the proposed class because employee pay was linked together via each defendant’s compensation structures.
To prove defendants’ alleged conduct suppressed wages, plaintiffs offered the expert regression analysis of Dr. Evan Starr. The Court excluded Dr. Starr’s testimony, finding Dr. Starr’s regression models, which formed the centerpiece of plaintiffs’ common proof of impact and damages, did not reliably measure wage suppression as required under Daubert. The Court found the models unreliable because Dr. Starr valued equity compensation at the time of vesting or exercise rather than at grant, meaning the regressions did not measure the antitrust impact of the no-poach agreements at the time compensation decisions were made. The Court reasoned that the conspiracy purportedly caused the harm of lower wages, which occurred at the time that wages were awarded to the employee. Thus, Dr. Starr’s analysis did not properly and reliably measure wage suppression at the time the compensation was awarded.
With the regression excluded, the Court found plaintiffs’ remaining evidence could not demonstrate predominance under Rule 23(b)(3). As to wage suppression, the Court held that the remaining qualitative evidence was insufficient given the diversity of the proposed class, which included employees in over 400 different job titles, spread across the country, and competing in different labor markets with various other non-defendant employers. As to class-wide impact, the Court found that none of the three defendants maintained the kind of formal, structured, or uniform compensation systems that would spread harm across job titles. Unlike the other no-poach class action case on which plaintiffs relied, the evidence here showed discretionary pay decisions, an emphasis on performance-based differentiation, and no formal pay bands.
Due to the variances across pay decisions, the Court held plaintiffs failed to meet their burden of establishing that common proof of injury will predominate. Instead, individualized inquiries would be necessary to determine whether a given employee was injured by the alleged conduct. Therefore, the Court denied plaintiffs’ motion for class certification.
The decision demonstrates that when evaluating predominance under Rule 23(b)(3), qualitative evidence of wage suppression may be insufficient for class certification where the proposed class is diverse in skills, geography, and job functions.
Antitrust Litigation