- “David Marcus on The History of the Modern Class Action” [Andrew Trask]
- Ted Frank profiled [American Lawyer] Related: “Expert in legal-fee fight blasts ‘make believe’ game over cost of contract lawyers to do doc review” [ABA Journal; CCAF on games case]
- “Statutory Penalties and Class Actions: Social Justice or Legalized Extortion?” [Paul Karlsgodt, DULR Online]
- Lawyers in Ford Explorer case claimed $500M benefit to class, on way to pocketing $25M fee; actual coupon redemptions $74,000 [Lawrence Schonbrun, American Thinker]
- Genesis Health Care Corp. v. Symczyk: can defendant moot class action by settling lead plaintiff’s complaint? [Karlsgodt, Trask, Fed Soc]
- Incentive problems of cy pres: a mini-roundup [Jennifer Johnston comment, JLEP, via Trask, Alison Frankel/Reuters on Ben & Jerry's case, PoL on U. of South Carolina, Daniel Fisher on Facebook case]
- Reactions to SCOTUS ruling in Comcast v. Behrend [Richard Epstein, Point of Law; Max Kennerly with a plaintiff's view; Fed Soc podcast with Ken Lee (Jenner & Block); Manhattan Institute podcast with Ted Frank]
Tagged as:
class actions,
cy pres,
South Carolina,
Supreme Court,
Ted Frank
- Justice done in Tewksbury, Mass. as feds won’t appeal loss in Motel Caswell forfeiture case [Institute for Justice]
- Oh, FTC: “Government Now Says Tweets Have To Include ‘The Fine Print’” [Business Insider]
- Judge lifts “no Facebook posts” order against class action objector [Paul Alan Levy, ABA Journal, earlier]
- House Judiciary Committee hearing on litigation abuse feature Ted Frank, John Beisner [link to video, Chamber-backed LNL]
- Update: minister who aided Miller-Jenkins custody-napping gets 27 month sentence [AP,earlier]
- Pennsylvania high court judge convicted on charges of using state staff for campaign [AP] Also in Pa., wife/chief aide of high court justice “has received 18 payments as referral fees for connecting law firms with clients” [Philadelphia Inquirer] “Arkansas Supreme Court Justice reports $50k gift from plaintiff lawyer” [LNL]
- Widow sues church for refusal to accept NASCAR-themed cemetery headstone [IndyStar]
Tagged as:
Arkansas,
forfeiture,
FTC endorsement rules,
Miller-Jenkins case,
Pennsylvania,
Ted Frank,
Twitter
Ted’s successful 7th Circuit objection in June in a Sears shareholder class action (Easterbrook: “The only goal of this suit appears to be fees for the plaintiffs’ lawyers”), which raised widespread discussion, is just one in a string of wins for his Center for Class Action Fairness in recent months. In a settlement involving complaints against Classmates.com, the judge agreed with the arguments of CCAF client (and George Mason lawprof) Michael Krauss, rapped class counsel’s knuckles with a $100,000 sanction for discovery tactics that amounted to harassment (see section III-D), and ordered a better deal for class members [PoL] And in yet another noteworthy case: “The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected a settlement of a class action over potentially leaky Volkswagen sunroofs that would have paid the lawyers who negotiated it $9.2 million in fees and the majority of car owners nothing.” [Daniel Fisher/Forbes, Ted at PoL, earlier]
Tagged as:
class action settlements,
discovery,
Ted Frank
- Town of Gold Bar, Wash. (pop. 2,100) brought to brink of bankruptcy by multiple lawsuits following political feuds; “We are going broke winning lawsuits,” says mayor [Monroe Monitor via ABA Journal]
- “No one in Youngstown Ohio has a Swiss bank account…except maybe that big new Swiss employer in town?” [Matt Welch, earlier] William McGurn: FATCA and the IRS’s reach abroad [WSJ via TaxProf, earlier here, here] Politicians and lawyers demand “improvements” to IRS bounty-paid-informant program, but what if anything they improve may depend on your point of view [TaxProf, earlier]
- A human rights professor endorses a new model of residential facility that comes with names like “Freedom Place.” But what’s that on the door — could it be a lock to prevent escape? [Maggie McNeill] Romney spokesman says he’ll smite smut, Gov. Gary Johnson takes a more libertarian view [Daily Caller]
- New Mark Herrmann book on in-house lawyering [Victoria Pynchon, Scott Greenfield, Paul Karlsgodt]
- Mortgage eminent-domain seizure plan raises serious constitutional concerns [Andrew Grossman, earlier here, here]
- Central casting? Send over one “business basher,” please: Sidney Wolfe says $3 billion Glaxo settlement too lenient [CL&P, earlier]
- Ted Frank pre-vets the possibilities for Romney VP [PoL] Romney’s law and legal policy team [Brian Baxter, AmLaw Daily]
Tagged as:
eminent domain,
international human rights,
lawyers,
legal blogs,
Mitt Romney,
mortgages,
pharmaceuticals,
Switzerland,
taxes,
Ted Frank,
Washington state
- “Fla. jury awards $75M to family of dead smoker” [AP] Bad trends catch on 10+ years later up North: Quebec becomes fifth province to sue tobacco companies [Montreal Gazette] We passed a law to let us win, so there: “Manitoba sues tobacco companies” [provincial press release]
- “Can There Be Liability When Sending Texts To A Driver?” A debate [Ray Mollica and Mark Bower, Turkewitz; earlier here and here]
- Ted Frank vs. Ron Unz on Vioxx health effects [PoL, American Conservative]
- Major Florida PI firm denies State Farm claims-inflation allegations [Orlando Sentinel]
- East St. Louis, Ill.: jury awards nearly $179 million to 3 injured grain elevator workers [Post-Dispatch]
- Siding with plaintiff’s bar, Minnesota Gov. Dayton vetoes legislation reducing state’s general statute of limitations from six years to four, reducing prejudgment interest from current 10%/year, reforming offer of settlement rules, and allowing interlocutory class certification appeal [NFIB] He does however sign one protecting state/local governments [Star-Trib]
- Multiple asbestos claims raise eyebrows in Delaware [SE Texas Record] On trends in asbestos litigation [Ben Berkowitz, Reuters]
Tagged as:
asbestos,
Canada,
Florida,
Minnesota,
Ted Frank,
tobacco,
Vioxx
Reuters reports:
A federal appeals court on Wednesday put the kibosh on a shareholder antitrust suit against the board members of Sears Holding Corp, finding that the suit only served to enrich the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
The ruling from the Chicago-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit marks the latest victory for Ted Frank, of the Center for Class Action Fairness, who argued that the suit was an abuse of the legal system and conferred no benefit on Sears shareholders at large. The 7th Circuit agreed.
“The only goal of this suit appears to be fees for the plaintiffs’ lawyers,” Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel.
More: Dan Fisher.
Tagged as:
class action settlements,
Frank Easterbrook,
Ted Frank
- Lawsuit claim: MERS mortgage system is just a racket to deprive court clerks of recording fees [Baton Rouge Advocate]
- More reporting on hospital and community drug shortages [Washington Post; my post last summer]
- Roger Pilon: How the “judicial activism” debate changed [Cato at Liberty]
- Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, spoken of as a future national political figure, has rather a lot of ties to trial lawyers [Political Desk]
- Problems with DOJ e-book antitrust suit targeting Apple [Declan McCullagh]
- One bogus campaign feeds into another: “ALEC Unfairly Demonized Over ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws” [Bader, CEI "Open Market"]
- New Point of Law discussion on class actions with Ted Frank and Brian Fitzpatrick;
- Today’s best spam comment? “With all the thistledown floating almost on the net, it is rare to look over a locate like yours instead.”
Tagged as:
antitrust,
Apple,
class actions,
Louisiana,
mortgages,
politics,
Ted Frank
- Too much of a stretch: US nixes copyright in yoga exercises [Bloomberg, earlier]
- “Know your rights dealing with cops” material construed as probative of criminality [Popehat] Is Justice Scalia really an “unlikely” champion of defendants’ Constitutional rights? [LATimes, Adler] “Overcriminalization: The Legislative Side of the Problem” [Larkin/Heritage, related Meese] When feds spring false-statements trap, it won’t matter whether you committed underlying offense being investigated [Popehat] “‘Clean Up Government Act’ sparks overcriminalization concerns” [PoL]
- Former Attorney General Mukasey on ObamaCare recusal flap [Adler]
- American Antitrust Institute proposals might be discounted given group’s longstanding pro-plaintiff bias [Thom Lambert]
- NYC: “The tour guide said that the way to get rich is to be a zoning lawyer.” [Arnold Kling]
- “Obama’s Top Ten Constitutional Violations” [Ilya Shapiro, Daily Caller] In at least two major areas, “Obama has broken with precedent to curtail religious freedom” [Steve Chapman]
- Ted Frank-Shirley Svorny med mal debate wraps up [PoL, Bader]
Tagged as:
antitrust,
Barack Obama,
constitutional law,
crime and punishment,
land use and zoning,
medical malpractice,
police,
recusals,
Ted Frank
- Big win for Ted Frank against cy pres slush funds [CCAF, Fisher, Zywicki, CL&P, @tedfrank ("Ninth Circuit rules in my favor ... but I still think I'm right".)]
- “Can the Vatican Be Subject to ICC Prosecution?” [Ku/OJ]
- “Tennessee: ATS Sues City Over Right Turn Ticket Money” [The Newspaper]
- “Law firms dominating campaign contributions to Obama” [WaPo]
- Does that mean it’s an entitlement? Punitive damage limits face constitutional challenges in Arkansas, Missouri [Cal Punitives]
- Businessman sues to silence critical blogger, case is dismissed, now files suit #2 [Scott Greenfield]
- Going Hollywood? “The Supreme Court should move to Los Angeles” [Conor Friedersdorf]
Tagged as:
Arkansas,
Barack Obama,
bloggers and the law,
Catholic Church,
cy pres,
Missouri,
punitive damages,
red light cameras,
Supreme Court,
Ted Frank
- Law firm settles with employee who said required high heels led to back injury [ABA Journal]
- Stock listings fleeing U.S. for overseas, legal environment a factor [Ribstein, TotM]
- Partial solution to above? Ted Frank places a stock bet on the Wal-Mart case [PoL, more]
- Wider press coverage of hospital drug shortage [AP, Reuters, my March post]
- Trial judge up north supports certifying as class action unusual suit blaming Newfoundland for moose collisions [Canadian Press via Karlsgodt, earlier here and here]
- Academic revolt against copyright overreach [Chron of Higher Ed]
- Sues deceased grandmother over trampoline injury [Madison County Record]
Tagged as:
animals,
Canada,
colleges and universities,
copyright,
hospitals,
pharmaceuticals,
Securities and Exchange Commission,
Ted Frank,
Wal-Mart
Ted Frank’s class action settlement reform group, the Center for Class Action Fairness, has announced “multiple victories” in ongoing cases arising from settlements by Apple, Classmates.com, Toyota, HP, and gasoline retailers. Among the topics addressed in objection: exaggeration of benefits supposedly provided for the class, excessive attorney fees, and diversion of proceeds to groups unrelated to the class. Details here.
Tagged as:
class action settlements,
cy pres,
Ted Frank
“A defense lawyer’s fleeting reference to the ‘uniquely iconic’ McDonald’s coffee case was enough for the Utah Supreme Court to order a new trial in a pedestrian accident lawsuit and allow the plaintiff to seek a larger damages award.” [Matthew Heller/OnPoint News; Jodie Hill/Downtown Lawyer] And Abnormal Use is out with a new interview of Ted Frank, who has written frequently on the hot-coffee case for this site, and who says:
The Stella Liebeck case was exactly the sort of thing that turns into an urban legend, and there are certainly a lot of inaccuracies that crept into the story as it went viral. The Liebeck case got politicized, however: it was an outrageous result and picked up as a poster child for tort reform, and, fascinatingly, the trial lawyer lobby, instead of reasonably saying “Look: the justice system is never going to be 100 percent correct, there have been a dozen hot coffee cases before this one where the courts got it right and threw it out, and you can’t make public policy based on a single anecdote just because the judge made a mistake here” decided to engage in a misinformation campaign to argue that the Liebeck case was both correct and an aspirational result for our tort system – and a disturbing number of law professors joined that cause. If you Google for the case, the vast majority of results are trial-lawyer sites filled with misstatements of the facts and laws. It’s gotten to the point that, in the majority of tort reform debates I participate in, it’s the trial lawyer who is the first to introduce the subject. I’ve been following the case and rebutting the misinformation on both sides since it first made the news, and it just so happens that the majority of misinformation is coming from the plaintiffs’ lawyer side these days. One of these days, I’ll lock myself in a room for a couple of weeks and write a law review article on the subject so there can be a one stop place for truthful information and arguments about the case.
I, too, gave a lot of thought to writing up the long controversy over the Liebeck case in my latest book, precisely because academic sources, and not just trial-lawyer publicists, persistently spread distortions and misconceptions about the case. Eventually it seemed like too wide a digression from the book’s main themes — but someone still needs to write up that story.
Tagged as:
hot coffee,
Ted Frank
Ted Frank, who’s challenging the Cobell (Indian trust) class action fees as part of his work with the Center for Class Action Fairness, catches out a lawyer who claims to have worked for more than nine hours a day on the case for 14 years, including a 7-year stretch in which he purportedly worked “an average of eleven hours a day, every day seven days a week without a single day off.” [Above the Law, earlier]
Tagged as:
attorneys' fees,
class action settlements,
Indian tribes,
Ted Frank
- “A conversation with class action objector Ted Frank” [American Lawyer]
- Reviews of new Lester Brickman book Lawyer Barons [Dan Fisher/Forbes, Russell Jackson] Plus: interview at TortsProf; comments from Columbia legal ethicist William Simon [Legal Ethics Forum]
- “Collective Bargaining for States But Not for Uncle Sam” [Adler] Examples of how Wisconsin public-sector unionism has worked in practice [Perry] Wisconsin cop union: nice business you got there, shame if anything were to happen to it [Sykes, WTMJ] “Union ‘rights’ that aren’t” [Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe]
- “Minnesota House Considering Significant Consumer Class Action Reform Measures” [Karlsgodt]
- 10,000 lawyers at DoD? Rumsfeld complains military overlawyered [Althouse via Instapundit]
- “Are Meritless Claims More Prevalent in Copyright?” [Boyden, Prawfs]
- Claim: availability of punitive damages reduces rate of truck accidents. Really? [Curt Cutting]
- Now with improved federalism: “The Return of the Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act” [Carter Wood, more, earlier here].
Tagged as:
class actions,
copyright,
labor unions,
Lester Brickman,
military,
Minnesota,
police,
public employment,
punitive damages,
sanctions,
Ted Frank,
Wisconsin
The problem, Ted writes in the Examiner, isn’t that the class action is “too large” — even very large classes can sometimes fit the law’s requirements that each claim be identical in nature and capable of standing or falling together.
But the theory of the Dukes lawsuit is exactly the opposite: the plaintiffs claimed that Wal-Mart’s central office did not exercise enough authority over each of its 3,400 stores; each of the individual managers’ discretionary employment or promotion decisions–whether made by male or female managers–was, on average, discriminatory; and thus Wal-Mart was responsible for a policy that “fosters or facilitates” discrimination. …
The discrimination laws permit Wal-Mart to defend itself by demonstrating that the challenged job decision was made for a reason other than gender. For example, looking at Betty Dukes, the named plaintiff, alone, we learn that she had a female manager and that she was repeatedly disciplined for returning late from lunch breaks. …Wal-Mart is stripped of its defense because the individualized defense would be inconvenient to trying the case as a class action. …
If the Supreme Court rules in Wal-Mart’s favor later this year, it will not be to protect business, but to protect due process.
Tagged as:
class actions,
Ted Frank,
Wal-Mart v. Dukes
