Mazie Slater misquotes a case

In Dewey v. Volkswagen, the parties negotiated and the district court approved a settlement that violates Supreme Court and Third Circuit precedent, which makes reversal likely. What's a class counsel to do? Make up new precedent! After talking the clerk's office into letting them include a sur-reply to the lead appeal's reply brief in their cross-appeal's reply brief, class counsel invented a quote in a recent Third Circuit en banc decision that, if accurate, would have all but dictated affirmance in this case.

We noticed the fictional quote, which required literary creativity rather than mere mistyping, and invited class counsel to do the honorable thing and withdraw the brief. Remarkably, they refused, so we have moved for sanctions, given class counsel's previous misrepresentations in the case and the evidence of bad faith in this particular misquote. (I'd be curious to see what Matthew Butterick thinks of the typographical smoking gun, identified on page 5 of our brief.)

Apple Magsafe class action settlement objection

We've objected to the Apple Magsafe class action settlement, which was recently criticized by AtlanticWire. Details at Point of Law.

Sixth Circuit brief in Pampers Dry Max class action

Details at Point of Law. Fortunately, Procter & Gamble is not my client, as they will be exceedingly unimpressed that we mortifyingly spelled their name wrong throughout the brief. At least the law is right.

Ninth Circuit briefing in In re HP Inkjet complete

We filed our reply brief today.

• Opening brief
• Plaintiffs' response brief
• HP response brief
• Reply brief

See if you can spot the big math error in the HP brief before you read the reply brief.

Reply brief filed in Cobell v. Salazar

Today, we filed our reply brief in the Cobell v. Salazar appeal (No. 11-5205 (D.C. Cir.)). Oral argument is scheduled for February 16.

Festivus update

• In the Toys "R" Us baby products antitrust case, the E.D. Pa. approved a settlement and fee request that pays $14M to attorneys and $8.1M to class members over our objection. Law.com describes it as a "24% recovery for the class"; if that's accurate, that raises the question why there will be another $13 million of payments to cy pres recipients not disclosed to the class instead of to the class. Aside from the fact of attorneys getting nearly twice as much as class members.
• We also lost in the Franklin Templeton Mutual case, where the judge approved a settlement and fee request where the attorneys are getting $2.142 million and the class $2.27 million. To me, that effectively reads the attorneys' fees restrictions directly out of the PSLRA, but we'll wait for a more egregious abuse to take that legal question up on appeal.
• With all that bad news, we'll take a small partial victory in the Fogel v. Farmers case, where the court reduced an outrageous fee request of $90 million (for a $159 million class recovery) to a merely ginormous $73.7 million award. The judge praised our objection as helpful and invited us to make a fee request. We requested between $10,500 and $33 thousand in fees and expenses, and the court awarded us over $47 thousand. Awkward. We'll try to put the money to good use for class members in other cases, though with appeals, we aren't going to see it for some time. The settlement had Bluetooth problems and the fee disposition is a gigantic windfall that could have been more appropriately directed at the class, but it's in California state court (a legacy pre-CAFA case), there are other objectors who will appeal, and we'll defer to what they're doing, with perhaps an amicus instead of a direct appeal; the long-term precedential value of this case, with even a successful appeal, is pretty close to zero.
• I forgot to mention a similar small partial victory in the HP Laserjet case back in August; the court approved the settlement after valuing the coupon relief at zero, but did reduce the attorney award from $2.75M to $2M. Close enough for government work; we didn't appeal.
• We've been invited to make a fee request in another case where we objected in the District Court of Maine a while back, the New Vehicles Canadian Export Antitrust Litigation, MDL No. 1532; our objection resulted in an improper $500,000 cy pres being returned to the class common fund. We haven't decided whether to request a token amount of that. 
• Appellee briefs are in in the Inkjet case in the Ninth Circuit. I'll post about that after the new year if you don't want to look it up on PACER yourself.

mid-December update

• Wednesday, we filed our Second Circuit brief in Blessing v. Sirius XM Radio, Inc. 
• Appellees are filing response briefs in Cobell v. Salazar today. We'll put them up in our Cobell appeal update post when they make it onto the web. Oral argument is scheduled for February 16. If you're going to be in the DC area at the beginning of February, and I know you personally, let me know if you're interested in attending a moot.
• The district court approved the settlement in Barber Auto Sales v. UPS. I'm unhappy with the ruling, which I think is very wrong, but the case is both too small and too narrow to be worth appealing; we already have the larger Sirius case and pending HP Inkjet case in appellate courts to raise the Class Action Fairness Act issues that would have been central to this case. Devoting resources to appealing this case would preclude us from objecting in a couple of other cases, and stretch us pretty thin with the existing appellate schedule. Can't win 'em all, even if we only bring cases that should be won.
• The district court approved the settlement and the fee request in Trombley v. National City Bank. If it's not an abuse of discretion to approve a 28% fee and $3000/hour-of-paralegal recovery when a case settles without any risk on Docket Entry No. 5, it never is, so we're thinking long and hard about whether to appeal this one; one objector has already appealed, so our appeal wouldn't have any effect on when payouts occurred.
• The appalling refusal of Missouri appellate courts to do anything about the coupon settlement ripoff in Bachman v. AG Edwards earlier this year resulted in that state receiving attention in the annual Judicial Hellholes report earlier this week.
• It's not all bad news. Yesterday was the hearing in the second Classmates.com settlement. The parties agreed to modify the settlement to remove the Bluetooth kicker, and the court indicated it would reduce the $1.05M fee request, meaning that money will go to the class. The fee reduction alone might outstrip the original $117,000 settlement, which is now worth over $2.5M. If you're keeping track, that's the fifth time in a row we've won a case and/or fee reduction against Kabateck Brown Kellner; one hopes that this discourages them from continuing to bring bad class actions just to negotiate self-serving settlements. This time, they refrained from abusive ad hominem attacks against us in their briefs; they're learning.