The plaintiffs, Celaratec, Uptown Title Dallas, and Ishmael Law Firm, are claiming a breach of contract and are seeking a refund of subscription costs due to several outages. Their subscription started in September 2009, and service was not accessible for several hours on April 23 and July 21, for nearly two days on June 15 and 16, and not at all July 14, according to court papers.

 

The company told PC World magazine that the June outages were because of an accidental power failure during routine maintenance that affected both its primary and secondary backup systems, taking a number of Intuit Web sites and services offline. The July 14 outage was blamed on a power failure in the San Diego area. In those situations, the company said security was not breached and no customer data was damaged or lost.

 

According to the Southeast Texas Record, described as Southeast Texas’s legal journal, the attorneys filed suit against Intuit Inc., on September 9 in Collin County District Court. Intuit removed the case to the Eastern District of Texas, Sherman Division, on October 22. Intuit spokesman Rich Walker said, “We don’t comment on the merits or content of any legal action.”

 

The proposed class action contends that Intuit made no attempt to compensate the attorneys for time frames the paid subscriptions services were not available. The proposed class would include all consumers who have purchased the services since September 2009, and have not received a refund or credit for the outages. The class action could include as many as 14,000 individuals and organizations, the legal journal reported.

 

The plaintiffs are asking the court to bar Intuit from retaliatory conduct and for an award of actual damages, attorneys' fees and expenses, interest, and court costs.