Randall v. UNOS
On March 25, 2026, the Court granted Plaintiffs’ motion for class certification in part. Defendants appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court and their appeal was denied.
Maddox v. UNOS
On March 28, 2025, the Court granted in part and denied in part Defendant UNOS’s motion to dismiss and denied Defendant Swedish’s motion to dismiss..
Haddix-Hamilton v. UNOS
This class action complaint was filed on July 21, 2026.
The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) manages the organ donation and transplant system in the United States. UNOS and affiliated hospitals have been using a race-based formula that artificially inflates kidney function scores (eGFR scores) of Black people based on unscientific eugenics-style racial stereotyping. These artificially inflated function scores can translate to serious delays in being placed on the kidney transplant waitlist.
Keller Rohrback, along with co-counsel at Watstein Terepka, LLC, represents plaintiffs in two class action lawsuits and one individual lawsuit against UNOS, Swedish Hospital, and Cedars Sinai Health Ventures. These lawsuits allege that the use of this race-based formula prevented Black people from receiving timely kidney transplants. This race-based test was premised on the assumption that Black people have more muscle mass than other people, which meant that their eGFR scores where actually “healthier” than a non-Black person with the same eGFR score. But there is no scientific merit to this assumption or the resulting eGFR score. As a result of this flawed assumption and test, Black patients’ kidney functioning scores have been overstated by as much as 16%-20%. This means the waitlist time of many Black patients has been increased by years, preventing them from receiving the kidney transplant that they need, leading to additional and significant health problems and risks.
Nationwide, more than 100,000 individuals are on the kidney transplant wait list. Despite making up approximately 13% of the population, Black people make up more than 30% of the individuals on the wait list. And for the last two decades, Black people have had to wait significantly longer than non-Blacks to receive new kidneys as a result of this race-based formula.
Together, these lawsuits seek to represent Black patients registered on the national kidney transplant lists that received or would have qualified for a wait time adjustment based on the race-based coefficients that were applied prior to 2022.
Keller Rohrback L.L.P. is headquartered in Seattle with offices in Phoenix, New York, Oakland, Missoula, and Santa Barbara. The firm has successfully represented individuals, classes, business entities, and governments, in vast, multiparty, multidistrict litigation, against some of the most powerful entities worldwide, including ExxonMobil, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and Microsoft.
