- Real-life Lysistrata: “Kenyan man sues over sex boycott ‘stress'” [Telegraph]
- Kagan record not reassuring on campaign-speech issues [Allison Hayward, CCP, Daniel Shuchman/Reason] A “fair-weather originalist”? [Ilya Shapiro, Cato]
- Eugene Volokh thinks the Court made the right call in the student-group-recognition Christian Legal Society case, while Richard Epstein thinks it didn’t;
- Coverage of Ted Frank’s objection in A.G. Edwards settlement [Daniel Fisher, Forbes; Bill McClellan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch]
- West Virginia: “Was DuPont railroaded in Harrison County?” [Don Surber]
- “Predicate” approach hasn’t always worked well as way to curb government privacy incursions [Stewart Baker]
- “Florida Court Tosses Out $522 Million Verdict Against Accounting Firm” [Daily Business Review]
- Justice Department dereliction? “Inside the Black Panther case” [J. Christian Adams, Washington Times]
Posts Tagged ‘class action settlements’
June 24 roundup
- “IP Lawyer Who Spotted Expired Patent on Solo Cup Lid Loses Quest for Trillions in Damages” [ABA Journal, earlier on “false markings” suits here, here, etc.]
- Like we’re surprised: Linda Greenhouse favors sentimental (“Poor Joshua!”) side in 1989 DeShaney case and hopes Elena Kagan does too [NYT Opinionator, my take a few years back]
- Why is Le Monde in financial trouble? For one thing, firing a printing plant employee costs €466,000 [Frédéric Filloux, Monday Note via MargRev]
- “Will these salt peddlers stop at nothing?” Michael Kinsley on NYT sodium-as-next-tobacco coverage [Atlantic Wire]
- “‘Victim’ Gets $4.17 Coupon, Lawyers Get $10 Million Cash”: Expedia class action settlement [John Frith, California Civil Justice Blog]
- Scruggs investigation finally over as feds drop probe of political operative P.L. Blake; several figures in Mississippi scandal are up for release soon from prison [Jackson Clarion Ledger]
- $20 billion Gulf spill fund: “Oil Gushes and Power Rushes” [Sullum, Althouse]
- “NYC Naked Cowboy to Naked Cowgirl: Stop copying me” [AP]
Volkswagen sunroof settlement, cont’d
Ted Frank’s Center for Class Action Fairness has filed an objection to the proposed settlement. Earlier here.
June 21 roundup
- After Mohawk Industries settlement, many employers could be sitting ducks for suits claiming that hiring illegal workers is RICO violation [Helman, Forbes, earlier]
- Teen tries to help child lost in store, winds up facing felony rap of false imprisonment [Greenfield]
- Federal magistrate in debt collection case: letter on law firm letterhead implies threat to sue [Legal Intelligencer]
- On “professional” class action objectors [Ted at PoL]
- Coal company claims ventilation system ordered by government regulators might have been a cause of deadly April mine explosion [WSJ]
- Senate committee approves judicial nomination of John (“Jack”) McConnell, impresario of Rhode Island lead-paint litigation; William Jacobson explains critics’ charges regarding couching of legal fee as purported hospital donation [Legal Insurrection]
- Hey, stop siphoning that oil slick, we haven’t checked your life jackets and extinguishers [GatewayPundit] Gulf oil rig registered for purposes of regulation in remote Pacific island chain [Legal Blog Watch] Richard Epstein on oil spill liability [WSJ] BP will never pay full price of accident [Popehat] Check back in 2031 to see how the litigation went [Alex Beam, Boston Globe]
- American Constitution Society holds panel discussion on Iqbal and Twombly [BLT] “Is It Too Much to Ask That a Lawsuit Be ‘Plausible’?” [Richard Samp, WLF Legal Pulse]
June 8 roundup
- Bay City, Mich. business finds itself the target of frequent litigant [Faces of Lawsuit Abuse (auto-plays video) via NJLRA]
- An “all-Taco-Bell future”: government nutrition guidelines press restaurants toward “standardization of recipes and methods of preparation” [Suderman, Reason “Hit and Run”]
- Class actions: thoughts on “professional objectors” [Ted at CCAF]
- Report on business influence on California politics smuggles in trial lawyers as “business” [Dan Walters, Sacramento Bee via CJAC]
- Those local homeowners protesting Wal-Mart may be getting support from a supermarket chain [WSJ via Coyote, Dan Mitchell]
- “Medicare soon to go after liability settlements” [Korris, LNL]
- “Use Your Law Deferment to Work for Liberty!” [Shapiro, Cato] And Cato’s also hiring for some video and new media positions;
- U.K.: “Drivers could be over limit after less than a pint under new law” [Daily Mail]
June 1 roundup
- Some California attorneys hoping to restart lucrative construction-defect litigation [Frith, Cal Civil Justice]
- Jury awards Seattle bus passenger $1.3 million for stair mishap [KOMO, Seattle Times]
- “Louisiana Bill Would Outlaw Insulting an Under-17-Year-Old By E-Mail” [Volokh, earlier] Update: bill watered down before passage, but still bad news for speech;
- “Attorney Fee Fight Gets Ugly in World Trade Center Litigation” [Turkewitz and more]
- Preventive detention law shows why we need to confine Congress [Sullum, Greenfield]
- Mass Fifth Circuit recusals in Comer v. Murphy Oil global warming case [Wood/PoL, Jackson] More: Shapiro, Cato, Wood/ShopFloor (a strategy to provoke recusals?)
- “By some estimates, circa 40 percent of cases in the Central African court system are witchcraft prosecutions” [Graeme Wood, The Atlantic]
- Lawyers who sued Facebook over “Beacon” to get $2.3 million in fees, class $0.00 [Balasubramani, SpamNotes]
Volkswagen sunroof class action settlement
Lawyers sued German automaker VW charging that water could leak into the car from the sunroofs on some of its models. Ted Major is not enthralled with the resulting settlement:
For many class members (such as myself), the only benefit they will receive is a piece of paper to put into the owner’s manual that says “check your sunroof drains every 40,000 miles.” That’s it, no reimbursement, no inspection, no free drain cleaning, nothing.
Lawyers say that and other benefits to class members, including an $8 million repair fund, are worth $125 million and justify a fee of $30 million plus $1.5 million in expenses. A fairness hearing in federal court in New Jersey is scheduled for June 26.
“An Empirical Study of Class Action Settlements and Their Fee Awards”
Brian Fitzpatrick (Vanderbilt), on SSRN:
This article is a comprehensive empirical study of class action settlements in federal court. Although there have been prior empirical studies of federal class action settlements, these studies have either been confined to securities cases or have been based on samples of cases that were not intended to be representative of the whole (such as those settlements approved in published opinions). By contrast, in this article, I attempt to study every federal class action settlement from the years 2006 and 2007. As far as I am aware, this study is the first attempt to collect a complete set of federal class action settlements for any given year.
I find that district court judges approved 688 class action settlements over this two-year period, involving nearly $33 billion. Fewer than 40% of the settlements were in securities cases, but the the vast majority of the money involved in the settlements came from securities cases. The $33 billion transferred by these 688 federal court class action settlements is, according to one estimate, equal to 10% of the money transferred by the entire American tort system over this two-year period. Of this $33 billion, roughly $5 billion was awarded to class action lawyers, or about 15% of the total. Most judges chose to award fees by using the highly discretionary percentage-of-the-settlement method, and the fees awarded according to this method varied over a broad range, with a mean and median around 25%. Fee percentages were strongly and inversely associated with the size of the settlement. The age of the case at settlement was positively associated with fee percentages. There was some variation in fee percentages depending on the subject matter of the litigation and the geographic circuit in which the district court was located, with lower percentages in securities cases and in settlements from the Second and Ninth Circuits. There was no evidence that fee percentages were associated with whether the class action was certified as a settlement class or with the political affiliation of the judge who made the award.
Class action settlement against A.G. Edwards
It might sound good, says Ted at CCAF, till you actually give it a look. A fairness hearing is coming up May 14.
May 5 roundup
- Jury rules for Disney in case of man who said Tower of Terror theme park ride caused him to have stroke [Orlando Sentinel]
- The most dangerous place on earth is getting caught between Dick Blumenthal and a television camera.” Craigslist snipes back against demagogic Connecticut AG [Craigslist blog, Antle/American Spectator, earlier]
- U.K.: prisoner falls from bunk bed, wins £4.7m [Times Online]
- New York Times jealously guards its own sources’ right to speak with anonymity, doesn’t feel quite that way about others’ [Stoll]
- SUNY Buffalo mathematician/HuffPo blogger: why’d they let that awful Eugene Volokh into the country? [Volokh vs. Jonathan David Farley, Greenfield, background]
- College journalist won’t face criminal trespass charges after all in showdown over photographing escaped cows [Romenesko and update]
- Regulating “the American palate” — by what authority? [Healy, Examiner] More links on FDA salt regulation [Compton/CEI, ShopFloor (on CSPI), earlier here, here, etc.]
- Why one putative beneficiary decided not to file $2 claim after settlement of AT&T class action [Chidem Kurdas, Christian Science Monitor]