August and September update

We've been very busy!

• In Fraley v. Facebook, the district court adopted our theory of attorneys' fees (zero value for injunctive relief and for settlement money paid to administrators); the parties, perhaps in response to our objection, upped the class-member award to $15 from $10. So a fee reduction of $2.5 to $3 million, with several million more available for the class. Not a bad day's work, and enough of an improvement that we're not going to appeal the parts of the decision the court got wrong.


• Speaking of whether class counsel should get a commission on money paid to the settlement administrator... You may recall the Ninth Circuit throwing out a bad settlement (in an opinion later modified) over Frosted Mini-Wheats that paid $800,000 to consumers, $2 million to lawyers, and some unknown figure to unknown cy pres. On remand, the parties set up a $4 million settlement fund—but $900,000 or so is earmarked for settlement administration. Is that a $4 million settlement, or is it really a $3.1 million settlement, because that's all the class can hope to get? Class counsel is "only" seeking $1 million this time, which is still disproportionate to actual class relief; meanwhile, the objectors who turned the $800,000 in class relief into over $2 million of class relief aren't being given anything. This morning, I'll be at the fairness hearing in San Diego, presenting the CCAF objection of Chicago Law professor Todd Henderson. Class counsel's main argument against us is that we're funded by the Koch brothers (not remotely true), and therefore we should be ignored. 


• We filed a cert petition appealing our Second Circuit loss in Sirius. I'll write a longer post about that, plus our amicus support.


• Another case that merits a longer post is a fascinating Eighth Circuit brief we filed last week in an appeal of a $2.6 million cy pres award.


• Speaking of bad cy pres (and bad coupon settlements), we filed our opening Ninth Circuit brief in EasySaver Rewards ($8.85 million for attorneys, $3 million for local cy pres, $225,000 and worthless coupons for the class) in July.
   
• CCAF attorney Adam Schulman filed an objection to the horrendous settlement in Berry v. LexisNexis, which is like Dry Max Pampers, but far worse, with a larger class and the attorneys asking for $5.5 million. This merits a longer post, but we were honored that a passel of very highly-paid attorneys representing a competing class action and their objectors saw fit to adopt so many of our arguments.


• In Pearson v. Target Corp., class counsel is seeking $4.5 million for a settlement over glucosamine sales likely to pay less than half of that to the class. I am a class member, and CCAF attorney Melissa Holyoke filed an objection on my behalf.


• In the Southwest Drink Voucher case, the court approved the settlement, but hasn't ruled on the attorneys' fees yet. We're deciding whether to appeal.


• Cato filed an amicus in support of our cert petition in the Facebook Beacon case.


• More press coverage than you can shake a stick at. And I did a lengthy "Liberty Law Talk" podcast with Richard Reisch about class action abuse generally.

Given that one of our attorneys is pregnant, another is getting married, and a third is moving, we're being very productive, though of course, we've had help from pro bono counsel.

CCAF in today's New York Times

The Adam Liptak article also generously cites my Congressional testimony on cy pres. Earlier: Marek v. Lane; Dry Max Pampers.

We maintain a complete set of our press coverage. Have we forgotten something? Drop us a line.

In addition, when I started doing this in 2009, I joked that there were only a dozen cases worth reading. That number is way up in 2013. We'd like to take some credit, given seven precedential appellate victories under CCAF's belt, and a number of good district-court and appellate decisions based on our litigation or on precedents we created. We've started a web page on the subject (which will be helpful for others wanting to object or design courses on the subject); happy to take suggestions if we left something important out.

We'd like to make our website a little nicer. If you have a good design sense and happen to want to provide us some pro bono web work to set us up a system that we can easily maintain, drop us a line.

Some updates

• The Ninth Circuit rejected en banc review of our victory in HP Inkjet. Here, for the record, is our successful opposition to the en banc petitions.
  
• In Wyeth Securities, the district court reduced an excessive fee request by $3,037,500. That puts CCAF over the quarter-billion-dollar mark lifetime in attorney-fee reductions or rejections in cases where we objected. I can't say I'm thrilled with the opinion, which makes a number of legal mistakes that will get used against future objectors, doesn't fairly address our objection, and says gratuitously unfair things about me, but, as I discuss at Point of Law, I'd rather a judge say mean things about me and then increase the benefit to the class than for a judge to say nice things about me and then rubber stamp a bad settlement and fee request.
  
• We'll accept praise from our peers, certainly. It's behind a paywall, but those of you with Law360 subscriptions can read a piece by Jeffrey Jacobson analyzing and praising our "impressive" track record, and warning defendants that they need to take more care in crafting class-action settlements. He's absolutely wrong about HP Inkjet, though.
  
• Speaking of good press coverage, we expect to have some good news later this week.

Sixth Circuit victory: In re Dry Max Pampers Litigation

A great opinion protecting class members against predatory attorneys. Congratulations to CCAF attorney Adam Schulman (Georgetown Law '10), who won his first appellate oral argument.

Details at Point of Law. Earlier on this blog.

Press and blog coverage: Fisher @ Forbes; Adler @ Volokh; Bloomberg; Wolfman 1; Wolfman 2; Cincinnati Business Courier; ABA Journal; WSJ Law Blog ($); Litigation Daily ($); Law360 ($). And a local tv news report that demonstrates why watching tv news makes you stupider.

Law360 also runs a lengthy thinkpiece analyzing a run of our recent cases, calling our results "impressive."

$26.7 million victory for CCAF in Citigroup Securities case

Details at Point of Law.

Our first cert petition, challenging Facebook Beacon cy pres settlement

We weren't involved in the 2-1 Lane v. Facebook cy pres decision disadvantaging consumers, and jumped at the opportunity to challenge it in the Supreme Court. On Friday (with generous pro bono work from BakerHostetler) we filed our first cert petition, and the first substantive request that the Supreme Court clarify the law of cy pres, a unique public-policy problem that both the Chamber of Commerce and Public Citizen agree upon. 

The Center has previously won such landmark cy pres decisions as In re Baby Products Antitrust Litigation and Nachshin v. AOL. I testified about the problem before a House Subcommittee in March, and will be speaking on an ABA panel on the subject in Boston in October. 

Redman v. Radio Shack

Redman v. Radio Shack Corp., No. 11-cv-06741 (N.D. Ill.) is a class action alleging a right to statutory recovery for Radio Shack's practice of printing expiration dates on credit-card receipts. The settlement provides $1M in attorneys' fees and $10 coupons to the class, without any mechanism to track redemptions required to justify such a large fee. Of course, there will be nowhere near the hundreds of thousands of claims comprising "settlement value" given the difficulty of making a claim, so the settlement also provide cy pres of leftover coupons to the Boys and Girls Club. Except Section 1712(e) of the Class Action Fairness Act explicitly prohibits the use of cy pres coupons for calculating fee awards. The settlement class is defined as

All persons who, between August 24, 2010 and November 21, 2011, paid by credit or debit card for products or services and received an electronically-printed receipt from any Store that contained the expiration date of the person's credit or debit card.

Excluded from the Settlement Class are Defendant, its officers, employees, and attorneys; transactions conducted with business credit or debit cards; and transactions made with RadioShack-branded debit or credit cards, as those cards do not contain expiration dates.

One hopes a class member aggrieved by this lawyers-first settlement will contact a non-profit attorney willing to help them object to a settlement with such an unfair and illegal fee request.