In Reed v. Advocate Health Care et al., Northern District of Illinois Judge John F. Grady, has denied class certification to a group of nurses who had sued four separate hospital systems in the greater Chicago area alleging that the institutions colluded to suppress their wages. In their suit, the nurses claimed that five Chicago-area hospitals regularly exchanged detailed and nonpublic information through methods, such as obtaining and participating in compensation surveys disseminated by the Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council, concerning pay for registered nurses. According to the suit the survey was a violation of federal guidelines for the lawful sharing of compensation data in the health care industry issued by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. In denying class certification, the court cited In re Hydrogen Peroxide Antitrust Litigation in holding that testimony from an expert witness employed by the nurses to prove their case, University of California at Berkeley economist Dr. Gordon Rausser, was unreliable to the point of being inadmissible. The court was thus persuaded that plaintiffs could not meed their burden of demonstrating that they have a viable method of showing classwide injury with common proof.