Rider v. Oxy USA, Inc.
No. 25-3142. 5/5/2026. D.Kan. Judge Kelly. Class Action—Denial of Class Certification—Fed. R. Civ. P. 23 Requirements.
May 5, 2026
Rider, as trustee of the Cherry Rider Family Trust, and R.W. Lucas and Cathy Lucas, as co-trustees of the R.W. Lucas and Cathy Lucas Living Trust (plaintiffs), own royalty interests in the Kansas Hugoton Gas Field. In 2008, a group of plaintiffs filed a putative class action against OXY USA, Inc. (Oxy) alleging Oxy was underpaying royalties on lease agreements in the Kansas Hugoton Gas Field. The matter ended with a court-approved settlement agreement in which Oxy agreed to provide $16.7 million to a settlement fund and to cease fuel charges and limit gathering charges on future royalty payments (the royalty provisions). In 2014, Merit Energy Company, LLC and Merit Hugoton, L.P. (collectively, Merit) acquired Oxy’s assets in the Kansas Hugoton Gas Field, at which time Oxy informed Merit about the identity of royalty owners to whom Oxy had been making payments under the settlement and the owners who opted out of the settlement. Oxy also gave Merit information on how it calculated royalty payments for participating class members. Plaintiffs claim that since Merit acquired Oxy, Merit has taken improper deductions from royalty payments in violation of the royalty provisions. Plaintiffs moved to enforce the judgment against Merit in state district court, but the court denied the motion on grounds that the judgment had become dormant and unenforceable under Kansas law. Plaintiffs appealed that decision, and their appeal is still pending before the Kansas Court of Appeals.
Plaintiffs filed the present putative class action complaint in 2023 in federal court alleging breach of contract claims against Merit and Oxy based on the settlement. Plaintiffs alleged that the settlement is binding on Merit and that the assignment did not relieve Oxy of its obligations. Merit and Oxy moved to dismiss the complaint as a matter of law, and the district court denied the motion. Defendants opposed the motion for class certification. As relevant here, the parties disputed the feasibility of identifying successors in interest to the class members. Plaintiffs maintained that the class could be readily ascertained from Merit’s business records, but Merit argued that ascertaining class members would require individualized land ownership analysis to determine which persons and entities have standing to assert a claim for breach of the settlement. The district court treated ascertainability as a sub-requirement of numerosity. The court stated that, to determine the class members, it would have to individually consider Merit’s payment records, lease records, acquisition records, and other documents to assess the land ownership chain for each payee, concluding this was administratively unfeasible. It held that the class members were not readily ascertainable and then determined that plaintiffs could not satisfy any other Fed. R. Civ. P. 23 requirements, so it denied class certification.
On appeal, plaintiffs argued that the district court erred by concluding that proof of record title ownership would be required for every potential claimant, notwithstanding that Merit can identify all royalty payees. Rule 23 does not explicitly include an ascertainability requirement, but most circuits require this before granting class certification. Since the district court’s class certification decision, the Tenth Circuit clarified its approach to ascertainability in Cline v. Sunoco, Inc. (R&M), 159 F.4th 1171, 1194 (10th Cir. 2025). In Cline, the Tenth Circuit rejected the “administrative feasibility” requirement and held that for class members to be ascertainable, the class definition must be clear and defined objectively. The moving party must provide a class definition “sufficiently definite” to allow the court to identify class members at some stage of the proceeding. Here, the proposed class is defined objectively and the definition is not vague because when Merit acquired Oxy’s assets, Oxy gave Merit the identities of those to whom it was paying royalties under the settlement, and Merit can identify each person or entity it has paid from its own records. Further, a defendant cannot defeat class certification by arguing that it must individually review a large number of records. Under Cline and based on the record, the class is plainly ascertainable, and finding to the contrary would be an abuse of discretion.
Plaintiffs also argued that the district court’s conclusions regarding administrative feasibility adversely affected the remainder of its analysis and it erred by concluding that the other class certification requirements were not met. Here, the court’s brief discussion of the other requirements focused primarily on challenges with identifying legal interest owners and how the putative class members do not have standing to enforce the settlement without proof of legal ownership. But the parties do not have to conduct individual title analysis at the certification stage, and the class definition is not a hindrance to eventually identifying those entitled to damages with reasonable accuracy. Further, plaintiffs do not have to prove standing as to every class member for certification purposes. The proper inquiries under Rule 23 show that plaintiffs satisfied the commonality, typicality, adequacy, predominance, and superiority requirements and thus support class certification.
The order was reversed and the case was remanded with instructions to certify a class.