In a major victory for Snow Cosmetics LLC, with implications for advertising and sponsorship agreements and consumer class actions generally, a New York federal court dismissed in full a lawsuit targeting the start-up teeth-whitening company for supposedly misleading advertising.
This initial suit also named Snow's celebrity endorsers, NFL star receiver Rob Gronkowski and Boxing Champion Floyd Mayweather, in a bid to generate as much press coverage as possible. Both have since been dismissed from the suit.
BraunHagey & Borden represented Snow in the lawsuit, with partner Douglas Curran serving as lead counsel.
The court ruled that the plaintiff did not have standing to bring the claims because he could not show that he had ever actually relied on any of the supposedly false ads. The court also called the decision to bring the lawsuit troubling, and strongly implied that the plaintiff's attorneys never had any good-faith basis for it.
The suit, filed in the Eastern District of New York, claimed that Snow's flagship product, a whitening system that incorporates an LED light in a mouthpiece, was ineffective and purchased based on misleading advertising. However, at deposition, the Plaintiff admitted that he made his purchase only after his lawyers, one of whom is a longtime friend and neighbor of the named plaintiff, had already drafted the complaint and sent a demand letter to Snow seeking a multimillion-dollar settlement.
The plaintiff also admitted in his deposition that he could not recall actually seeing, much less relying on, any of the allegedly misleading advertising that formed the basis of the lawsuit. The judge also noted in the decision that the plaintiff admitted that he didn't think he could pick out Mayweather by sight.
In dismissing the case, the court noted:
"Given . . . the strong circumstantial evidence Defendants have presented suggesting that Plaintiff only purchased the product in order to generate this lawsuit, the complete lack of any connection between the Plaintiff's testimony and the allegations in the Complaint is even more troubling. This is particularly true since the Complaint appears to have been drafted before Plaintiff purchased the product and seemingly without any attempt to conform the allegations in the Complaint to Plaintiff's actual experience."
