class actions settlements

UPDATE LAWYER GRANUFLO

GranuFlo, Naturalyte, dialysis, dialysis pharmaceutical drug litigation attorneys in this case announces a new update. Dialysis continued drug lawyer filed a claim immediately edin. Granuflo attack class action lawsuit filed in the heart of the Fresenius dialysis treatment

Fresenius Medical Care, Pennsylvania, in recent years, with hundreds of deaths is linked to the solution of a sudden heart complications company GranuFlo during dialysis treatment, a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of those who suffer facial.

Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas in Brysten by Carmen on June 14, receiving dialysis treatment GranuFlo class status - action and heart attacks, heart-related sudden death, or experienced cardiac events, including all Pennsylvania residents who want to complain.

In November 2011, after the death of her husband Brysten Brysten filmon, a class action lawsuit brought Granuflo. In the same month, Fresenius bicarbonate level is expected to rise to a higher level and cause users to suffer a sudden heart attack, or death Granuflo, warning about the risk of problems for their own dialysis clinics, doctors issued an internal memo.

CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT

People who have been injured by the actions of the company in a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of the group. Works published by members of the public company to see what kind of cases or illegal wage practices. A pharmaceutical company makes a claim against another type of product they illegally take this medication cause physical damage or death, or published.

When someone joins a class action lawsuit, she usually forfeits the right to sue the company announced at the time to sign up as an individual has. Damage award to the plaintiff is successful teams in huge losses for the company sued. In most cases, all team members have the same right to compensation. Generally, lawyers, and they will receive a portion of the prize fails to customers at no charge, but means that the team as a possibility, work. That part of the total award ranging from 30 % to 50 % may be too high.

These cases can be resolved juries or courts. The suit also tried to mediate. Defendant or defendants agreed to the settlement and mediation means losses. Locations with heavy damages and compensation in the case of a jury trial can cause problems because the company appealed against the decision. During the appeal process in May last year, so that the plaintiff may have to wait a very long time before you see any money. Companies in bankruptcy, the report refers to the plaintiff never received any compensation.

One of the most famous class action lawsuits are explored class Erin Brockovich. Hinkley, California on behalf of the residents of a biopic with proper details. They Pacific Gas & Electric ( PG & E ), then seep into the soil and contaminate water supplies are required to lie about the use of hexavalent chromium chemicals. After many Hinkley residents became ill with cancer or have fertility problems. We also live in a small town in the animal dies quickly.

Tim lawyer, Ed Masry, PG & E knew about the condition and deliberately failed to warn people risking their lives for plants can live. Erin Brockovich, played by Julia Roberts movie, thoroughly researched and documented the damage caused by residents of Hinkley. PG & E. Ed Masry successfully against the decision of its commitment to help secure direct financial assistance directed mediation is strongly influenced by exposure to chromium means that this case is not.

CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT

The Ninth Circuit has scheduled oral argument in the Bluetooth case for Monday, February 7, 9 a.m., in the federal courthouse in Pasadena. (Five other cases are on the calendar, so I probably won't get my fifteen minutes until after 10 a.m.) I'm undefeated (well, ok, 1-0) in that courthouse.

The first time I ever visited the Pasadena courthouse was in the fall of 1992, when a memorable young law clerk in Alex Kozinski's chambers named Eugene Volokh quizzed me about the issue of toughening evidentiary standards for expert witnesses in what I think was the first law-clerk interview of the season for 1994-95. (That was the first attempt of the judiciary and the legal academy to create a cartel for the hiring of law clerks, and I unwittingly caused it to break down when I sent my resume out without consulting with the law school, and Judge Kozinski started calling people in for interviews, causing a chain reaction that unraveled everyone's plans.) Eugene, of course, went on to bigger and better things.

If you're in the DC area, and you're interested in putting in a few hours reading briefs and throwing questions at me on a moot court later this month, please drop me an email. (Friends from Kirkland & Ellis: sorry, you're adverse to me in this case, so you're not invited.)

Under Fed. R. App. Proc. 30(b), appellants and appellees are to coordinate the production of a joint record on appeal, the appendix of the relevant filings and transcripts from the lower court proceedings to assist the appellate court in their review of the case. A number of courts of appeal, including the Seventh and Ninth Circuits, have very common-sense approaches to this: they've established local rules whereby each side submits their own appendix.  Others haven't caught on to the game-playing that can go on, and go with the default federal rule.  So, I, as an appellant, negotiate with the appellee settling parties about what appears in the record.

Time after time, I see the appellees asking to kill countless trees by burying the record on appeal with paper from the lower court. One might think they're doing this to just increase the costs of litigation for the other side, since the appellants are required to prepare the record on appeal—except Rule 30(b)(2) permits the appellant to take the position that the additional material is unnecessary, and ask the other side to advance the costs of providing the designated material. The real reason is, I would imagine, an insulting one: to persuade the judge that there's so much work to be done that the judge should just be lazy and throw up their hands and ignore the issues rather than dig through all the paper. This certainly never fooled the judges I clerked for, but it must work often enough to be worth the death of all these trees. There aren't any real sanctions with any bite for making appellate judges' lives harder like that, notwithstanding the clear command of Rule 30(a)(2) not to be pointlessly including material, so we have this wasteful game.

I'm seeing this now in one of my pending appeals; the appellees are trying to bury the record in meaningless paper that has nothing to do with the issues on appeal. I can't stop them, so I shrug my shoulders and ask for the payment that Rule 30(b)(2) requires. That should be the end of it, but for some reason the lawyers—often the same lawyers that have made me write a check to post an appeal bond to ensure they could recover their costs in the unlikely event they won on appeal—want to argue with me that the material is essential to the record on appeal and it's up to me to pay for including the material in the record on appeal. I generally don't play this game, but I recently had cause to write the following paragraph in a letter to defense counsel regarding the copying costs of one small three-page slice of the hundreds of pages they wanted included (material redacted to protect the guilty):

Docket No. [yyy]. [This docket entry] applies to the 10-[xxxx] cross-appeal and is not relevant to [my appeal]. I agree that if you decide to prosecute the cross-appeal, you will be required to advance the costs for us to include this docket entry in Volume 1 of the Record. Should you prevail in [the cross-appeal], you can petition to receive the approximately $5 to $20 in costs from the plaintiffs' appeal bond, but I understand if you wish to bill another $100 to your client to argue about this some more.

You may recall that I was not pleased with an Apple settlement that provided for $2.5 million to go to a series of universities and law schools with "corporate governance" programs (two of which were affiliated with the lead plaintiffs' counsel) instead of to the purportedly injured class members. (See also coverage from Ira Stoll, Jim Copland, John Carney, and Lyle Roberts.) Such "cy pres" awards are a breach of class counsel's fiduciary duty to the class by putting the interests of unrelated third parties ahead of their putative clients.

After I sent a letter to class counsel and counsel for Apple notifying them that I had a client who was going to object, the parties quickly rushed to court and submitted a modified settlement. Now, class members have first bite at the $2.5 million, an approximately 15% increase in what shareholders can recover in the settlement; Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Delaware will not get any of it.

This is definitely a material improvement (and one that would entitle the Center to attorneys' fees), but it's still not good enough; I've asked the court to refuse preliminary approval until the settlement guarantees that the class gets the entirety of the $16.5 million settlement fund.

Notice went out today, and five separate people have emailed me in the last hour about the Google Buzz settlement, which I've been tracking since it was first announced a couple of weeks ago.  It flunks Rule 23, but, believe it or not, is not the worst settlement in the world (we have four cases pending in Ninth Circuit courts alone that are worse, including one in in Judge Ware's court).  In addition, this case is going to attract attention from a lot of privacy advocates whether or not the Center for Class Action Fairness gets involved, so I don't know how much value-added we provide by being the n-th objection.  And I'm a class member, so if we do get involved, I can do so pretty quickly.

Anyway, this is just to say that yes, CCAF is aware of the Google Buzz settlement; we haven't decided yet whether to get involved because we have six or seven other briefs due between now and Christmas; if you're interested in getting involved without waiting for that decision, take a look at our Ninth Circuit briefs in the Bluetooth (09-56683) and AOL (10-55129) cases that we filed earlier this year.

Did you buy Apple stock between 2001 and 2006?

Ira Stoll and Jim Copland have discussed the outrageous Apple backdating lawsuit resulting in the outrageous Apple backdating settlement. The magnitude of the settlement compared to the original claims demonstrates that it is an extortionate nuisance settlement, being made because it would cost more to defend the suit than to pay the attorneys to go away.

But it should be noted: the settlement is not just outrageous, it is illegal. Under the Ninth Circuit's Six Mexican Growers precedent, a court should not be issuing cy pres that is not likely to benefit the class members. And as the Center for Class Action Fairness noted in recent Ninth Circuit briefing, the American Law Institute has said that cy pres is inappropriate where class members are readily identifiable. Given that the class attorneys are negotiating money for third parties instead of their own putative clients (for their own benefit, no less), there is also a breach of fiduciary duty that raises questions whether the class attorneys meet the Rule 23(a)(4) standard. The settlement is further problematic in that the vast majority of class members are entitled to zero compensation; it is far from clear that the sole lead plaintiff is a member of this subclass.

The Center for Class Action Fairness would love to object to such a blatantly illegal settlement. But it can't do so in a vacuum: it can only do so on behalf of a class member who is being ripped off by these attorneys. Class members are those who bought Apple stock (AAPL) between August 24, 2001 and June 29, 2006—but only people who bought the stock between November 2005 and May 2006 are entitled to recover any money under the settlement, and their recovery is being diluted by the diversion to cy pres. We'd be happy to represent you pro bono if you agree that settlement is objectionable and wish to object: please contact me. If you're not in the class, but know people or institutions who might be, spread the word.  (Update: we have one objector, and are talking to a couple of others. Isn't crowd-sourcing great?)

Trial lawyers often say that they care about access to justice, but that principle seems to go out the window when it comes to objectors to unfair class action settlements that might interfere with attorneys' fees.

In Dewey v. Volkswagen, currently pending on appeal in the Third Circuit (10-3618, consolidated with 10-3506, 10-3617, 10-3798, and cross-appeals 10-3651 and 10-3652), the plaintiffs' attorneys have asked for an oversized appeal bond explicitly to prevent the appeal from taking place.

Plaintiffs claim that such an appeal bond is necessary to prevent "extortion" on appeal, the problem where a "professional objector" seeks to hold up the payment of the settlement attorneys' fees with a meritless appeal in the hopes that the class attorney will pay some fraction of the time value of money to get the objector to drop the appeal.

The Center for Class Action Fairness took the plaintiffs at their word, and, in our brief opposing the appeal bond, cross-moved for a different remedy: an injunction against extortionate settlements of the objection. Such an injunction, by requiring court approval of any withdrawal of the appeal, would do far more than an appeal bond to deter the attempt to settle a case for a quid pro quo payment to the objector without any benefit to the class. We suggested, however, that the plaintiffs' attorneys weren't really concerned about extortionate appeals (which permit them to escape appellate scrutiny at relatively low cost) so much as the fact of appeal.

Sure enough, the class counsel opposed the Center's cross-motion for injunction, though on remarkably flimsy grounds that insultingly presuppose a lack of intelligence on behalf of the magistrate; surely they don't expect that the judge will be confused by the difference between a merits injunction and an injunction regarding the conduct of the parties on appeal? You'll also note that the plaintiffs completely changed their theory behind the reasoning of the appeal bond without ever addressing the Center's arguments in their reply brief, but one hopes the district court isn't so easily fooled by sandbagging.

Relatedly, on September 22, the Third Circuit decided In re Community Bank of N. Va., which all but guarantees that we will win our appeal, given that the Dewey settlement suffers from the same fatal defect of a prejudiced subclass being unrepresented.

You may have been one of the millions of people to receive a settlement notice regarding a class action against Classmates.com; the settlement notice implied that class members would receive $9.5 million (though only $2-$3 per person, and that mostly in coupons) and the attorneys would ask for $1.3 million.

You then probably received a supplemental notice saying that the attorneys were generously only asking for $1.05 million, and that, if you sent four letters to four different addresses, you could object to the fee request.

You probably didn't object: it's hardly worth your time to spend $1.76 in postage over a $2 or $3 settlement.

What you won't see on either of the settlement notices or the settlement website is how much the class is actually recovering: out of millions of class members, there were fewer than 50,000 claims made. The class will receive only $117,374 (see page 4 of PDF). The attorneys are asking for a 895% contingency fee.

Professor Michael Krauss of George Mason Law School will be objecting to the fee award (and an attempt to rip off the class by diverting $500,000 to an unrelated charity instead of to class members); the Center for Class Action Fairness is proud to represent him.

The fact that an Internet company didn't make it possible to object over email is just an attempt to limit the number of objections. But CCAF is willing to help: we won't represent you, but if you submit a conforming objection to me over email to classmates.objection@gmail.com in a pdf by November 15, CCAF will do the mailing for you. Here is an MS Word document to make the process easier; fill in the blanks, keep or delete or add to the paragraphs as you see fit, sign, scan, e-mail (or mail yourself to the addresses indicated). (CCAF is not your attorney if you choose to have us mail your objection for you; we reserve the right not to mail any pdf that is offensive or seems to be fake.)

The trial lawyers are arguing that the low number of objections means that this is a good settlement. That's clearly false given how hard they made it to object and the fact that class members weren't told the full truth about how bad the settlement was, but let's try to take away that argument by sending the court a few dozen more objections. And tell your friends.

Note that the class attorneys in this case are Kabateck Brown Kellner, who were the attorneys in the $0 AOL Footer settlement; in that case, they took the position that it was okay to hide conflicts of interest to the court and to the class in a class notice. So we're not just objecting, we're asking for the discovery that KBK said we should have done in the AOL case.

Update, September 4: Google is leading lots of people to this page, but this post is referring to a 2010 settlement, which we successfully objected to. If you came to this page from a search engine, you are probably looking for the revised 2011 settlement.

• In Lonardo v. Travelers Insurance, our objection resulted in a $2 million improvement in the settlement. We maintained the objection, and the court approved the settlement; we straightforwardly acknowledged that the court "could" approve the improved settlement (where the attorneys got nearly as much as the class as opposed to more than twice as much) under its discretionary powers, but "shouldn't," and the court found that offensive for some reason. To add insult to injury, the court preemptively made findings that we weren't entitled to even ask for attorneys' fees for our role in improving the settlement. On a motion to reconsider, the court begrudgingly awarded attorneys' fees, and then proceeded to come up with bad dicta that suggests that objectors are obligated to engage in expensive discovery about settlement negotiations before they are completed. (The scenario where a settlement is improved by 71% on the eve of the fairness hearing is rare enough that one hopes that does not matter; it's pretty clear that settling parties would object to the discovery that would produce the evidence that the Lonardo court says is required.) The $40,000 in fees is nice, but it was unfortunate that the court felt the need to insult us along the way; we made it clear that there was substantial work we performed on the case for which we were not seeking fees, and the court repeatedly implied that the only thing we did were the few dozen hours we requested fees for. We did get the court to acknowledge that Perdue v. Kenny A. applies to class-action attorney-fee requests (though that does not explain why the court awarded a 1.4 multiplier to the plaintiffs' attorneys). If those opinions were issued today, when we have a diversified donor base, we would have appealed. At the time, we were low on funds, and had to make a triage decision to save our powder for more egregiously bad decisions. Judging by Google hits, class members have started to receive their checks, which are 71% larger than they would have been without our objection.
• In the Sears case, the court denied our motion to dismiss and our motion to intervene, the latter because we sought to appeal, and therefore were "obstructive." That reasoning begs the question when one is entitled to move to intervene for purposes of appeal; the court did not cite the leading Seventh Circuit case on the issue. We will appeal: we believe Devlin gives us standing to do so, and, in any event, the denial of the motion to intervene was clearly erroneous. I am excited about this appeal, as it will give the Seventh Circuit the chance to clarify the law of derivative shareholder lawsuits and whether it is appropriate to bring them for the primary purpose of extracting attorneys' fees.
• I'm also enthused about our chances in the Dewey v. Volkswagen appeal to the Third Circuit. The plaintiffs have requested a punitive appeal bond, and the district court will rule on that in October. I'll have a post about that later in the week.
• Alas, I will not be participating in another appeal I was confident about, the Ninth Circuit Yahoo! appeal.  As you know, the Center for Class Action Fairness refuses to settle a class action objection unless the withdrawal of the objection results in a settlement that is fair, adequate, and reasonable. Our clients disagreed with that approach, and we have withdrawn as counsel. We did not ask for and will not accept any fees in that representation.

CCAF filed its reply brief today in the Nachshin v. AOL appeal.

The principal-agent problem does not just affect class action plaintiffs' attorneys enriching themselves at the expense of their putative clients. I see it far too often in the case of class action defense attorneys beholden to the billable hour at the expense of their clients. I've had securities defense attorneys admit to me sotto voce that they don't want to see securities law reformed, because they're making money off the status quo. If I were a defense client, I'd worry about attorneys like that; they might prefer to lose their 12(b)(6) motion in the hopes of churning some billable hours in discovery disputes. In a notorious example, attorneys from defense firms lobbied the ABA to release a statement opposing preemption—something that would hurt their clients, though would certainly increase the demand for lawyers' services. (I once had a lunch date with a pharmaceutical defense attorney who made a disparaging comment to me about "you people" believing in federal preemption. That second-person-plural mystified me: she was making a lot more money arguing in favor of preemption in court on behalf of her clients than I was making writing about preemption on public-policy grounds. If one's that offended by preemption, one should go work for a plaintiffs' firm where one can make more money in the long run: it's stupid to be selling out one's principles for less than one's opportunity cost of adhering to them.)

I've long felt that general counsels should do more to insist that their outside defense firms are really defense firms that believe in their clients' rights, rather than mercenary law firms that happen to represent defendants because their lawyers don't have the entrepreneurial courage to be contingent-fee plaintiffs' attorneys.  Top-of-the-line plaintiffs' attorneys are the best trial lawyers in the business: they don't get paid if they don't win, but they're the ones with the Gulfstream jets and 5000-person Christmas parties.  If a defendant responds by hiring a coddled Ivy-League defense attorney that's afraid of the inside of a courtroom and goes home at night feeling vaguely guilty that he's working for The Man, that defendant is going to get his head handed to him nine times out of ten.  That sort of ideological accounting is surely more important to the bottom line than the racial-diversity accounting many Fortune 500 companies insist upon in their outside law firms, but it happens far less than it should.

Anyway, in response to CCAF's opening brief in the Nachshin v. AOL case, the settling parties apparently agreed that AOL's defense attorneys would do all the briefing, and the plaintiffs' attorneys would simply free ride off the finished product:

• AOL response brief.
• Plaintiffs' response brief.

The plaintiffs couldn't even be bothered to cite their roman numerals in consecutive order.

For the life of me, I can't imagine why a defense attorney with the best interests of his client in mind wouldn't simply say: "You sued us, you defend the settlement. We're paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars to go away. My client shouldn't have to pay another penny into this case." But that would mean foregoing some fees. And why would a defendant's brief say something as vapid as "Both class actions and legal aid funds facilitate the supply of justice to those who cannot otherwise afford it" (p. 25)?  Trial lawyers, come sue AOL! According to AOL's brief, you're just facilitating the supply of justice when you do! (I was similarly amused that AOL of all parties would snark about the supposed fact that our opening brief would cite "online articles." That was especially ironic given that AOL pays writers to produce online articles for them.) I briefly worked at the same firm as Paul Cappuccio, a hard-nosed lawyer's lawyer who went on to become the general counsel of AOL before he escaped on a life-raft to keep the Time Warner general counsel job.  I cannot begin to imagine a general counsel's office supervised by Cappuccio permitting a brief like this to be filed, but perhaps I'm being naive.

As you can tell for yourself, these were exceedingly weak response briefs that never really engaged with our opening brief's argument against the conflict-of-interest problems in cy pres distribution, so I'm feeling good about our reply brief and about our chances.

In the 1998 case of Felzen v. Andreas, the Seventh Circuit suggested that it was looking for an opportunity to take action against derivative shareholder strike suits, suits where a shareholder purportedly sues on behalf of the corporation, but in reality is seeking legal extortion to drop the suit:

Rule 23.1 provides for notice to shareholders only in the event of dismissal or settlement, so that other investors may contest the faithfulness or honesty of the self-appointed plaintiffs; we do not doubt that this monitoring is often useful and that intervention to facilitate an appeal could be justified. Many thoughtful students of the subject conclude, with empirical support, that derivative actions do little to promote sound management and often hurt the firm by diverting the managers' time from running the business while diverting the firm's resources to the plaintiffs' lawyers without providing a corresponding benefit. Janet Cooper Alexander, Do the Merits Matter? A Study of Settlements in Securities Class Actions, 43 Stan. L.Rev. 497 (1991); Reinier Kraakman, Hyun Park & Steven Shavell, When are Shareholder Suits in Shareholder Interests?, 82 Geo. L.J. 1733 (1994); Roberta Romano, The Shareholder Suit: Litigation Without Foundation?, 7 J.L. Econ. & Org. 55 (1991); Mark L. Cross, Wallace N. Davidson & John H. Thornton, The Impact of Directors' and Officers' Liability Suits on Firm Value, 56 J. Risk & Insurance 128 (1989); Daniel R. Fischel & Michael Bradley, The Role of Liability Rules and the Derivative Suit in Corporate Law: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, 71 Cornell L.Rev. 261 (1986). The two shareholder-appellants in this case believe that the modest settlement, half of which will be paid to counsel, exemplifies this problem.

Unfortunately, the appeal in Felzen was thrown out on technical grounds, and no one has taken up the challenge, perhaps because it's more lucrative to agree to be paid off for withdrawing an objection to a bad settlement than for successfully challenging the bad settlement.

Until now. Plaintiffs brought a meritless derivative-shareholder suit over an alleged technical violation of the Clayton Act; the corporation found it cheaper to pay the plaintiffs' attorneys $925,000 to go away than to defend the suit. But the shareholders get nothing, so they're worse off because of the litigation.

Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, not only did they sue in the Northern District of Illinois, they sued a corporation where I own shares. After attempting to foreclose objections by mailing out notice three days before objections were due, the parties agreed to a new notice schedule, and I have moved to intervene and dismiss the action for failure to meet the Rule 23.1(a) standard for shareholder representation. The case is Robert F. Booth Trust v. Crowley, No. 09-5314 (N.D. Ill.) and the fairness hearing is August 27 in Chicago.

Today's a busy day (there were filings in three different pending objections and appeals, two of them by us), but we'll have to postpone discussion of those cases to note that, on Friday, the U.S. District Court in Kansas rejected the $0-for-the-class/$10M-for-the-attorneys settlement in the Costco Fuel case that we argued in April. Alas, the court ruled on narrow technical grounds and punted on some critical economic questions, so we might see substantially the same settlement again in a couple of months if the parties can jump through the hoops the court established—but if the settlement remains unfair and unreasonable, I'm sure the objectors involved will want to object again.

Our associate, M. Frank Bednarz (Chicago '09), did much of the work on the Costco briefing, so I'm sure Friday was special to him—not least because it was also his wedding day! Mazel tov to Frank and Meridith. Go buy them some light bulbs before Frank starts at his BigLaw job in Boston in a couple of months. When Frank gets to Boston, I bet he'll be the only person there who already has a winning $10-million brief under his belt.

Have you ever heard of structured settlements? If you are a recipient of a legal settlement, you may have to wait a long time before you get the entire amount. There may be instances wherein you cannot wait a long time. If you have a need for immediate cash, this is the option to take. You will not have to wait a long time.


There are various reasons why you may receive a settlement. These cases involve the death of a family member, injury, medical malpractice, work related injuries, defective products, etc. In these cases, there will always be settlements involved. These settlements are meant to pay for the damages that the recipient is going through.

Although you receive a significant amount of money for the damages done against you, you do not get the entire amount. You have to wait a certain period before you are fully paid. The time frame for settlement can take months, years, and even an entire lifetime. If there is a need to get immediate cash, there is no way to speed up the process.

There is a reason why you do not get the money right away. Due to the damages inflicted, you may not be able to make a living for yourself. You have been temporarily injured, or you may have been permanently injured. In any case, there will be no chance for you to make a living during recovery. This is the main reason why you do not get all of the money right away.

Payment in increments will make sure that you have enough to pay for things like medical expenses and your daily needs. This way, you are guaranteed a future for you and your family. However, there will be instances when there is an immediate need for the entire amount. This is when structured settlements will be needed.

The reasons for needing the money right away may vary. You may need it for a family member’s educational needs, mortgage payments, loan payments, payment for debts, etc. In these cases, monthly or yearly payments will not be enough. This is when you will need the bulk of the settlement.

With structured settlements, a firm will offer to buy these court settlements from you. The reason why they choose to purchase them is for long term monetary gains. They offer to give you the bulk of the settlement with a few fee deductions. This fee ranges from 10 to 30 percent of the total amount.

With this option, you do not get the entire amount. However, you get the bulk of money right away. With immediate cash at hand, you will have more options to satisfy your immediate needs. You will have cash to spend for educational purposes. You will have ready cash to spend for debts. You will money to spend for emergencies whenever you experience them.

You can never tell when emergencies may come. If you a recipient of one of these court settlements, you are in luck. No longer do you need to worry. You can now take the option of structured settlements.

The Ninth Circuit’s holding in Concepcion v. AT&T Mobility, barring an arbitration clause that prohibits class actions as "unconscionable," rests upon a belief in the exceptionalism of class actions, namely, that they are a uniquely superior form of dispute resolution the availability of which is necessary to vindicate consumer rights. But, as the Center’s experience indicates, class actions are far from an exceptional vehicle for providing consumers with meaningful access to justice.  Yesterday, the Center filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case of AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion (No. 08-893) in support of the petitioners.  O'Melveny & Myers attorneys Brian Brooks, Charles Borden, and R. Seth Davis did a phenomenal job with the brief, and we're grateful for their help.  Public Citizen, which ironically represents the anti-consumer/anti-arbitration/pro-trial-lawyer side in the name of paternalism, has a page devoted to the case withf links and resources, though the weight of those links and resources is pro-paternalism; the left side of the blogosphere has paid far more attention to this case than the right side.  Among the briefs is one filed by a number of law professors I know and admire, including (but not limited to) Randy Barnett, Henry Butler, Richard Epstein, Michael Krauss, Geoff Manne, Michael Moreland, Larry Ribstein, and Josh Wright; it raises important points about unconscionability and freedom of contract.

When Apple introduced its iPhone into a smartphone market where it had 0% market share, it cut a deal with AT&T Mobility to make it the exclusive provider of cell phone service.  In exchange, ATTM subsidized the price of every iPhone by $450, thus ensuring that more consumers would be able to purchase iPhones, and introducing additional competition into the smartphone market. 

Nonetheless, trial lawyers sued, bringing a class action alleging that this basic business arrangement violated the antitrust laws because it threatened to monopolize the previously non-existent market for "iPhone telephone service." 

This is ludicrous on its face.  The smartphone market is more competitive than ever: in addition to the longstanding Blackberry, there's new entrants Droid and HTC Evo (and vis-a-vis the latter, see this NSFW, but very funny, video).  Without the phone carrier subsidization, many iPhone owners (including me) would be unable to afford an iPhone, and are clearly better off because of the exclusivity deal.  Nonetheless, the Northern District of California has certified a class action over the practice—and not just any class, but a Rule 23(b)(2) mandatory class, meaning that every iPhone owner with an AT&T Mobility two-year contract is now involuntarily represented by attorneys that apparently care more about the possibility of extortionate settlement profit than the clients they purportedly represent. 

The Center for Class Action Fairness is in talks with a number of iPhone owners who are concerned about being represented by class counsel who don't have their best interest at heart, and considering filing papers moving to intervene and decertify the class.  But economic experts willing to go on the record to refute quack antitrust analysis are not cheap; before we blow a good chunk of our annual budget on one, we're curious if there's anyone out there willing to work for a discount rate or, better yet, pro bono.  (In the alternative, if there's another public-interest law firm out there who'd like to take the lead role on this, I am happy to serve pro bono as both the client class member iPhone owner and as the expert witness, as well as assist on the legal side.  Unfortunately, legal rules prohibit me from serving as both lead attorney and as a witness.)

A tiny percentage of Volkswagen and Audi sunroofs will leak into the vehicle unless care is taken to keep the plenum clear of debris; a class action was brought over this.  Let's assume for the moment that plaintiffs are correct that this is something that Volkswagen is liable for, and that there are contractual remedies for VW not foolproofing the cars against this problem.  What's remarkable is how the parties settled the case in such a way so that wildly inefficient remedies would maximize attorneys' fees at the expense of the class.  The settlement is structured as follows:

1. A million class members will get nothing but a letter telling them to check the plenum when they go for their 40,000-mile service.
2. VW will perform an expensive preventative service action on some, but not all, VWs that might suffer this problem.
3. An $8 million settlement fund is set up to pay damages for some, but not all, VWs that have suffered damage

The economic expert for the plaintiff made some remarkable calculations.  For example, he valued the letter at over $29 million.  After all, if you get a letter informing you of a potential benefit, that letter is worth just as much as the benefit itself—never mind that Volkswagen dealers charge $400 to $800 for 40,000-mile service, and can easily choose to raise the price $30 to account for the extra labor in performing the extra task during the maintenance service.  So if Apple ever settles a class action by sending you a letter telling you you can buy a $700 iPad for $700, that is, according to the expert, indistinguishable from Apple writing each consumer a check for $700.

Let's look at #2 for a second.  According to the plaintiff's own expert, VW will spend $55 million on that service action.  According to the same expert, if VW does not perform the maintenance, those vehicles will suffer $24 million in damage.  (The expert then remarkably triple-counts this as a benefit to the class: the $24 million in damage avoided, plus $55 million in VW expenses for the service action, plus another $24 million for the avoided diminution of value of the vehicle that would have occurred if the vehicles suffered damage and then weren't repaired.  Thus, according to the expert, this component of the settlement is worth over $103 million.)  Spending $55 million to avoid $24 million in damage is the very definition of economic inefficiency. 

But consumers lose out.  Some of the class members who are getting nothing but a letter—including one of my clients—have suffered actual damage from sunroof leakage.  They're not getting paid under this settlement and are being forced to release their claims, which are no less meritorious than the claims that are getting paid.

The only possible reason for plaintiffs' attorneys to insist upon this convoluted remedy is to increase attorneys' fees.  By making Volkswagen engage in wasteful spending, they pump up the alleged value of the settlement and then argue that they're entitled to over $23 million in attorneys' fees and costs, to be paid separately by Volkswagen.

It would have been very easy to structure a settlement so that Volkswagen created a $48 million fund to cover repairs to every vehicle that suffered water damage from a sunroof leak.  Every VW owner who had the problem in the past or in the future would be able to collect; Volkswagen would be out of pocket $48 million instead of $70-$90 million; the attorneys could have made a plausible claim for $10 million in attorneys' fees and costs from the fund, which would still be close to twice an exaggerated lodestar.  Instead, the parties negotiated a settlement that made everyone—consumers and Volkswagen—worse off.  Well, everyone except the attorneys, if Judge Patty Shwartz buys the quack economic testimony and awards the full fee request.

Under Rule 23(e), a judge is not to approve a settlement unless it is "fair, adequate, and reasonable."  It is hard to see how this settlement is fair or reasonable; and it demonstrates the failure of legal ethics that the class attorneys could structure this settlement and make that fee request without fear of sanction, even as they put their own interests ahead of their clients.

The four-hour fairness hearing, consisting mostly of the economic expert rationalizing his calculation and the attorneys arguing over fees, was last Monday in a Newark federal courtroom.  I look forward to seeing how the judge will rule.