“A federal judge in California last week criticized two lawyers for bringing an additional 49 law firms into a data-breach case, raising to 53 the total number of firms representing the plaintiffs….’What made you think I wanted 53 firms churning on this case?’,” asked U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh, telling lawyers from Altschuler Berzon and Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll that she was “deeply disappointed.” Koh went on to grant a request for a special master filed by Ted Frank, class action reformer with CEI and formerly a blogger in this space. [Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal]
Posts Tagged ‘Ted Frank’
CCAF contests $8.5 million Google privacy settlement
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]
Plaintiffs finally drop Subway “footlong” class action
“Plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit brought over Subway’s ‘footlong’ sandwiches have decided to abandon efforts to pursue the litigation,” two months after a Seventh Circuit panel scorchingly criticized a proposed settlement (“utterly worthless… no better than a racket.”) [Jessica Karmasek, Legal NewsLine; our earlier coverage]
Class action roundup
- “The entire panoply of extreme cy pres abuse is present”: Google privacy class action [James Beck; Ted Frank petition for rehearing]
- Settlement administrator greatly overestimated claims in TCPA suit against Rita’s Italian Ice, judge orders reallocation of money to class [P.J. D’Annunzio, Legal Intelligencer]
- “U.S. Judges Could Learn From U.K. Court’s Rejection Of MasterCard Class Action” [Daniel Fisher]
- Revisiting a failed 1978 proposal to replace class action with hybrid public/private enforcement [David Freeman Engstrom, U. Penn. L. Rev. via CL&P]
- David Marcus (Arizona), “History of the Modern Class Action, Part II” covering 1981-1994 [forthcoming Fordham L.Rev., I turn up in footnote 360 and a couple of others; Part I is here]
- Medical monitoring class actions, once seen as wave of future. have not done well [John Sullivan, Drug & Device Law]
Ted Frank enters the monkey arena
As we highlighted earlier this week, while it was no surprise that PETA and photographer David Slater worked out a settlement agreement to end the ridiculous lawsuit PETA had filed, it was deeply concerning that part of the settlement involved PETA demanding that the original district court ruling — the one saying, clearly, that animals don’t get copyrights — should be thrown out.
It took just a few days for Frank, on behalf of CEI, to file a wonderful and hilarious amicus brief with the court. There are a bunch of reasons why vacatur is improper here, but the real beauty of this brief is in pointing out that Naruto — the monkey — has been left out of the settlement, and thus not “all parties” have agreed. No, really.
“Utterly worthless,” “no better than a racket”
7th Circuit judges take carving knife to lawyers’ “footlong” class action settlement with Subway sandwich chain, after objections from Ted Frank [Lowering the Bar, CEI, earlier]
Speaking of the Seventh Circuit, Judge Richard Posner, among the most influential legal thinkers and jurists of the past half-century, is stepping down. He changed my thinking and if you hang out around law or policy probably yours too [our past coverage and tag; Evan Bernick on Twitter; Cass Sunstein (“I have my disagreements with Judge Posner, but let’s give credit where it is due: His influence has made the law much better, and the world is a lot better off as a result.”)]
Liability roundup
- Ted Frank, crusader against class action abuse and formerly a contributor to this blog, profiled [Caleb Hannan, Bloomberg]
- Judge: “Milberg attorneys engaged in an elaborate scheme of deceptive conduct” in qui tam relator case [Bailey McGowan/WLF, opinion in Leysock v. Forest Labs]
- “One way to help save the subways: Repeal the Scaffold Law” [Mike Elmendorf, New York Post]
- Not for the first (or eighth) time, U.S. Senate looking like a graveyard for liability reform bills [Bruce Kaufman, Bloomberg]
- Illinois: “it has not been unusual over the years to learn that insurers don’t want to write policies in Madison County because of the litigation factor.” [Madison County Record]
- “Data-Breach Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Concoct New ‘Overpayment’ Harm Theory, with Mixed Results” [Greg Herbers, WLF]
Liability roundup
- Entrepreneurs launch plaintiff’s insurance to cover costs of pursuing litigation, not quite same thing as the “legal expense insurance” commonly found in loser-pays jurisdictions [ABA Journal]
- More on the class action procedure case Microsoft v. Baker, from the just-ended Supreme Court term [Federalist Society podcast with Ted Frank, earlier]
- Why Bristol-Myers Squibb, the Supreme Court case on state court jurisdiction, “is one of the most important mass tort/product liability decisions ever” [James Beck/Drug & Device Law, earlier]
- Sandy Hook massacre: “Newtown And Board Of Education Seek Dismissal Of Wrongful Death Lawsuit” [AP/CBS Connecticut]
- Pennsylvania: “Evidence-Manipulation Claims Dog Asbestos Lawyer” [Lowell Neumann Nickey, Courthouse News] “California’s Latest Litigation Invitation: A Duty to Protect Against ‘Take-Home’ Exposure” [Curt Cutting, WLF]
- It’s almost as if trial lawyers were in the driver’s seat of these ostensibly public actions: Tennessee counties’ opioids suit also seeks to strike down the state’s tort reform law [Jamie Satterfield, Knoxville News-Sentinel]
About that “Mnuchin’s bank foreclosed on widow over 27 cents” tale
Last month Politico reported that Treasury Secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin’s bank “filed to take a 90-year-old woman’s house after a 27-cent payment error.” Ted Frank writes that four minutes of fact checking would have shown the story wrong. “A. Widow was never foreclosed on and never lost her home. B. It wasn’t Mnuchin’s bank that brought the suit….The story on its face made no sense. No court permits that kind of foreclosure, and banks lose money on the deal.” The story was widely spread in the media (CNN, Vanity Fair, The Hill) and popped up again at Mnuchin’s confirmation hearing for Treasury secretary.
“Lawyers Defend $300 Million Fee In VW Settlement, Say They Didn’t Ride DOJ’s Coattails”
Ted Frank and plaintiffs’ lawyers battle over objections in the class action aftermath of the case of the car too good to be true [Daniel Fisher] Related: Andrew Trask on class action objectors.