It’s a cy pres special: members of the injured class will get no part of an $8.5 million settlement Google negotiated with plaintiff’s lawyers over a data privacy lapse. “Instead, the money is to be split among the plaintiffs’ attorneys, who billed their time at $1,000 an hour, and others. The others are cy pres recipients, or organizations that are not parties in the suit: Carnegie Mellon University; World Privacy Forum; the Center for Information, Society and Policy at the Chicago-Kent College of Law; Stanford Center for Internet and Society; Harvard University’s Berkman Center; and AARP Inc.” Ted Frank’s Center for Class Action Fairness is asking the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari after its objections were turned down by lower courts. [Dee Thompson, Legal NewsLine, earlier here and here (Beck: “cy pres abuse poster child”)]
Plus: Bank of America settlement will now yield cy pres windfall for five University of California law schools of $150,000 rather than $20 million. Easy come, easy go? [ABA Journal]
2 Comments
Please take note that only the legal press seems to have this. Very few Americans — including lawyers — even know what ‘cy pres’ means. Yet the abuse here is patent. It’s yet another example of the media either 1) not getting the issue, 2) cheering the plaintiff lawyers and assuming whatever they do is peachy, or some combination of 1 and 2.
The U.S. Media is 90% left-leaning and cy pres funds go overwhelmingly to left leaning groups. I think it’s more “Why rock the gravy boat? “