On April 16, 2026, the firm secured an appellate victory on behalf of Brita Products Company ("Brita"), a unit of The Clorox Company, in a putative class action challenging the labeling of Brita's water filtration products. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld a lower court ruling dismissing the complaint, agreeing that the product labeling contained no misstatements and would not mislead a reasonable consumer.

 Plaintiff originally sued Brita in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, alleging that certain representations on the products’ labels, such as “Cleaner, Great-Tasting Water,” implied that the filters fully remove all contaminants from tap water or reduce them to levels below lab detection limits. The district court granted Brita’s motion to dismiss in September 2024, agreeing that Brita’s labels claimed only to “reduce” certain specified contaminants, and that Plaintiff’s contrary interpretation was unreasonable as a matter of law. The would-be class representative appealed, arguing that the district court had improperly overlooked his “omissions” theory of liability: that Brita had an affirmative obligation to warn that its filters did not completely remove all contaminants, even if it had never claimed that they did. 

In a published opinion, the Ninth Circuit unanimously affirmed the dismissal of the complaint. It agreed with the firm and the district court that “no reasonable consumer would expect Brita’s low-cost filters to completely remove or reduce to below lab detectable levels all contaminants present in tap water”—particularly given Brita’s “extensive” and “easily accessible” disclosures about the particular contaminants its products did reduce. Given the unlikelihood that reasonable consumers would be deceived, the Ninth Circuit held that any purported omissions were non-actionable as a matter of law. The Ninth Circuit also held that the district court’s denial of leave to amend was proper because “no amendment could save [the] complaint from the conclusion that reasonable consumers have not been misle[d].” 

This precedential decision is important for manufacturers for several reasons. First, it clarifies that purported “omissions” from product labels are not actionable—even assuming a duty to make such disclosures—unless the failure to disclose would cause reasonable consumers to behave differently. Second, it establishes that clear disclosures about what a product does should defeat a claim based on the failure to disclose what a product does not do. And third, it reconfirms that, in appropriate cases, district courts may make “reasonable consumer” determinations as a matter of law, even at the motion-to-dismiss stage.

To read press coverage from Bloomberg Law and Law360, click here and here.