LOS ANGELES - Plaintiff lawyers who pursued a class action over supposedly adulterated avocado oil must pay Walmart $624,000 in legal fees after a judge ruled they should have known their lead plaintiff didn’t have a valid claim.
Attorneys Christin Cho and Rick Lyon with Dovel & Luner failed to verify that plaintiff Edie Golikov had purchased the avocado oil in a bricks-and-mortar Walmart store. The case collapsed when Golikov revealed she bought it online, making the purchase subject to an arbitration clause.
“While there are presumably unnamed plaintiffs who purchased avocado oil from brick-and-mortar stores, there is no allegation that plaintiff is one of them,” Los Angeles federal judge R. Gary Klausner wrote. He ordered Cho and Lyon to pay Walmart $623,738.70 for more than 800 hours of wasted defense time by the firm Davis White Tremaine.
Golikov said she bought the oil “from a Walmart store” in 2021, but acknowledged in an April 2025 court filing that she actually bought it online. The lawyers asked the judge for permission to substitute a new representative plaintiff but he refused, saying that is only allowed if the original plaintiff had a valid claim.
Judge Klausner decertified the class in August and approved the request for sanctions in November, ordering the final dollar amount in a December in a Dec. 19 opinion.
Cho and Lyons argued they were guilty only of an “inadvertent oversight,” but Judge Klausner disagreed. He found the lawyers recklessly filed a frivolous complaint.
Cho said she prepared the initial complaint with the help of a staff member and didn’t realize the 2021 purchase was online. Lyon said he only oversaw the preparation of the complaint and “never had reason to go back and check” the facts about the purchase.
“Counsel’s failure to verify a material fact constitutes recklessness,” the judge wrote. Because of the false allegation, the court had to “resolve unnecessary disputes that would not have occurred had they simply stopped to check” whether the plaintiff had purchased the avocado oil in a store.
The judge rejected plaintiff lawyer arguments defense expense were excessive due to duplication and overstaffing. They said Walmart’s lawyers should have expended no more than 130 hours on the case, while billing records show they spent 76 hours on the motion to dismiss, 10 hours to answer the first amended complaint, 147 hours opposing class certification and 418 hours in discovery.
The judge also dismissed complaints the two lawyers were unable to pay such a large amount. “Plaintiff offers no evidence in support of their contention they are unable to pay,” the judge said. Cho, a graduate of Amherst College and Cal Berkeley law school, says on the firm website she won a $160 million case and has invested in cryptocurrencies since 2011. Lyon, a Stanford and Harvard Law School graduate, boasts of winning a $74 million jury verdict.
