Super Ego’s Mimic notches win in court case; settlement coming?

One count, Count II in the lawsuit, was dismissed with prejudice, which means it can not be refiled. Count II dealt with Super Ego’s practices regarding the federal Truth in Leasing Act. 

Judge Pacold in her order said it was being dismissed with prejudice “to the extent it relies on an aiding and abetting theory.” Further explanation was not included in Judge Pacold’s brief order.

Whether there will be an opportunity to refile the counts dismissed without prejudice is not certain.

‘Significant progress’

The day before the dismissal, the clerk in the case said there had been an all-day settlement conference that had “made significant progress toward settlement, although work remains to reach a final resolution with both sides agreement to a continued settlement conference.”

While Mimic’s dismissal may take a headline name out of the lawsuit, there are still plenty of other defendants facing the same counts Mimic was: Super Ego Holding LLC; Floyd, Inc.; Kordun Express Inc.; Rocket Expediting LLC, Jordan Holdings dba JHI Transport; Rex Trucking; Haidar Dawood LLC; Twin Carrier LLC; Windy City National Trans; and Trytime Transport. 

The drivers’ lawsuit against those defendants remains intact.

The lawsuit described the defendants as “an affiliated group of transportation carriers, leasing companies and holding companies that are owned and operated in common.”

CBS made them famous

Super Ego became known to the wider public in the spring when CBS’ 60 Minutes produced a feature on the company and identified it as a “chameleon carrier.” 

Chameleon carriers are loosely identified as a company or group of companies that generally have a poor safety record, dissolve when facing safety enforcement or litigation related to safety, and recreate as essentially the same company under a different DOT number. 

The driver plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit allege numerous illegal practices carried out by Super Ego and its affiliates, much of it through lease purchase programs that involved a marketing campaign “designed to induce drivers to travel to Defendants’ headquarters in Illinois, using their own money, pay Defendants significant amounts of money toward the lease-purchase of trucks and other operating expenses, and then haul loads for significantly less money than Defendants promised to pay them.”

The individuals counts in the drivers’ lawsuit were one, breach of contract; two, violation of the Truth in Leasing Act; three, violation of the Illinois law on fraud and deceptive business practices; four, civil conspiracy; five, common law fraud; six, violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act; and seven, violation of an Illinois wage law.

Mimic’s dismissal came on counts one, three, four and five.

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