class actions settlements

Update: Court rules for NVIDIA. If you're a class member with questions about the case, and why your attorneys argued against your own recovery, you need to talk to your attorneys at Milberg; I cannot help you. Please do not contact me about this case asking how you can get your computer fixed.

In the NVIDIA GPU settlement, owners of HP notebook computers affected by a defective chip had to be thrilled: the settlement notice promised them that, with proper documentation, they would receive a “replacement HP notebook computer … of similar kind and value as their eligible malfunctioning notebook computer.” But after the settlement was approved, they learned,much to their displeasure, that their class counsel, Milberg LLP, negotiated that they could only receive an entry-level Compaq CQ50, often worth over a thousand dollars less than the computer they would be replacing. Let's hope this is an oversight, rather than a deliberate attempt to deceive the class and the court: I senta letter to the settling parties' counsel today asking for clarification.

Update, January 16: I'm getting dozens of emails from class members because of a couple of posts on HP-related message boards from class members suggesting that I be lobbied. Please understand that I am not in a position of power to unilaterally do anything about the settlement. I am an attorney who represents consumers pro bono in similar situations where attorneys try to rip off class members in settlements. I am certainly interested in this case based on what I've heard, and I am investigating at the request of a class member. I agree that the current settlement claims process is inconsistent with the notice given the class; you don't need to try to convince me of that fact. If the settling parties don't do anything to fix the problem, and can't satisfy me that they have a legal basis to do what they did, and research determines that legal intervention has a chance of fixing the matter, I'll write back a few of you to see if you can generate a signed declaration for the court proceedings to help the court understand the extent of the breach of the class counsel's promise to the class. But I amnot your attorney unless you and I agree to a signed retention agreement that I am your attorney. The fact that I wrote a letter to the class counsel about this question does not mean that you should not investigate the possibility of legal representation for yourself.

Update, January 18, 4:15 PM Eastern: I have not received anything in writing as of this afternoon. I called the Milberg firm, and they claim that the information on the website is "premature" and not the "final" version of the settlement. This is mysterious, given that Milberg has control over the website. Worse, Milberg refuses to provide anything in writing that the website will be updated with different information, so Milberg can deny that they told me this later. Still, there is a claim that there will be a "meeting" tonight to discuss modifications to the claims process. One would hope that any such modifications includes corrective notice to the class and an extended claims process to make up for the inaccurate information previously given. I will check the settlement website next week. The low level person I spoke to did not seem to understand the difference between an objection to a judge's decision and asking Milberg to comply with the judge's order, and kept asking me if I thought the judge had made a mistake. Class members thinking of writing me should instead politely call Milberg at 213.617.1200 and get an answer about whether and when the Milberg NVIDIA settlement website is up to date, and why inaccurate or "premature" information has been posted to the website. If Milberg tells you something different than they told me, leave a comment here.

Update, January 26, 7 PM Eastern: I finally spoke with Mr. Westerman at Milberg. He's asked me for more time to negotiate with NVIDIA to work through some of these issues. Depending on whether the settlement administration procedure changes, at the end of the day, we may or may not agree whether the parties are in compliance with what the settlement and the class notice promised, but I'm willing to give him the chance: my preference is for the parties to make this right without me getting involved by filing papers with the court. If I sign up clients, I will not be signing up dozens of clients: I will be working with two to five people who have very clear-cut cases where the CQ50 or the Asus EEE T101MT-EU17-BK is self-evidently to a layperson not a “replacement HP notebook computer … of similar kind and value as their eligible malfunctioning notebook computer” and ask for classwide relief; I may contact a few other class members and ask for them to provide declarations supporting the argument. That said, you should not view my participation in the case as a reason not to retain a lawyer on your own: I am not your lawyer unless we have a signed retention agreement. While I am happy to receive spec sheets describing the model of your computer and comparing it to the replacement computer, please do not contact me asking me for updates or for personalized legal advice: I will update this blog post as new information comes in; if you've read the blog post, you know everything I know and can tell you.

Update, February 1: After another conversation with Mr. Westerman today, I will reevaluate the situation on February 9.


Update, February 10. The settlement website has been finally modified: claimants deemed ineligible between January 10 and January 22 are encouraged to resubmit claims; the replacement computer remedy for HP notebook computers will be a Compaq Presario CQ56 computer, rather than a CQ50. That still doesn't address the tablet problem; leave your comments on your thoughts about the CQ56. Mr. Westerman has asked me to refrain from action this week (and, frankly, the press of other commitments in existing cases would mean that I would need to do that anyway). Please remember that I am not your attorney and cannot provide individualized advice on how to respond to the settlement, and please do not rely upon me as your only recourse; there may be other attorneys willing to look into this. In particular, I encourage you to contact the consumer division of your state attorney general's office (and city/county office as well, if you have one). I will check back in with Mr. Westerman February 15.




Update, February 16 - The settlement has been modified, though in ways that do not solve the grievances earlier discussed for most class members. A number of class members have formally retained me; we'll be filing some sort of papers with the court before the end of the month asking for the court to intervene to enforce the promises made to the class, though I'm still doing research as to what form those papers will take, and whether we're proceeding against just NVIDIA or both NVIDIA and class counsel. (NVIDIA counsel never responded to my letter.) I did not speak to Mr. Westerman on February 15, and he's in court today, but I'll try to reach him tomorrow to determine class counsel's position on our petition to the court, and whether they'll cooperate with us or oppose us. (I would view any opposition as a breach of fiduciary duty to the class.) One thing I know we'll want is declarations in support of our motion. If you're interested in submitting such a declaration (under oath, under penalty of perjury) to the court expressing your thoughts on why the computers are not of like kind and value, leave information in this thread with a way to contact you, and someone may be in touch with you next week (though we probably will not have the chance to get declarations from everyone who offers to issue one). Please continue to note: (1) if we do not have a retainer agreement, I am not your attorney in this case; (2) I cannot offer individualized advice about how to respond to the settlement; and (3) if you do submit a declaration to the court, you do so voluntarily to help the cause of your fellow HP owners: it does not make me your attorney.

Update, February 22 - One of my clients has established the website http://fairnvidiasettlement.com/ to summarize what's happening and collect potential declarations from other class members. While he is doing the declaration data collection on my behalf, he is not speaking for me, but the site is a useful compendium of information. We may end up with dozens of declarations, but I am not going to want to overwhelm the court, and will likely only use six to twelve of them. I am currently negotiating a briefing schedule with the settling parties in the hopes of getting a hearing date with the court before the claims period expires; without court approval for expedition, there wouldn't be a hearing before April.

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.)

If I were to buy a three-pack of color ink for my inkjet printer today, it would cost me $42.99 at HP.com and $36.99 at Amazon.com. That's not a big deal—unless HP is trying to settle a class action by giving class members $2 coupons that can only be used at HP.com (and can't be transferred or stacked, and expire in six months). And even if the coupon was larger (some class members get $7 coupons) HP makes much more money selling ink at HP.com than at Amazon.com, all else being equal: this is a marketing program for them. And the attorneys are claiming that they're entitled to $2.9 million for such a lame settlement because the coupons are "worth" $5 million. And even if one attributed full face value to the coupons (which the parties try mightily hard to not call coupons), I strongly suspect far less than $5 million of coupons will be claimed or redeemed.

The Center filed an objection today in the Northern District of California. Kabateck Brown Kellner, who we've seen before in the $0 AOL settlement and the $117k Classmates.com settlement, are among the lead attorneys in this ripoff as well.

Objections are due January 3. If you're a class member (and most people who purchased HP inkjet printers in the last nine years are, and there are tens of millions of them out there), you can file a claim or object at the settlement website; this settlement nicely permits emails if you prefer objecting that way.

In the Kellogg's Frosted Mini-Wheats class action settlement, class members (those who purchased the cereal on certain dates in 2008 and 2009) who submit claims will receive $5/box for up to three boxes of purchased Frosted Mini-Wheats, with claims pro-rated if there are more than $2.75 million in claims. If there is less than $2.75 million in claims, money goes to a charity that has yet to be named. In addition, Kellogg's will donate "$5.5 million" in food to charity (that also has yet to be named), though there is no indication how that valuation will be determined. For this, six law firms are requesting $2 million in fees, though:
That amount of fees is disproportionate to the class relief;
the settlement provides for cy pres relief even though there might be more than $8.25 million in claims, demonstrating that the attorneys put the interest of the third-party charities ahead of their clients' interest; and
the class notice is defective for failing to identify the charitable recipients of the cy pres, giving the class no opportunity to object to an improper recipient.

If you're a class member and you're unhappy with attorneys improperly making millions in your name, do contact me at the Center for Class Action Fairness to discuss your options.

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.