Today, Pennsylvania enforcement officials abandoned their appeal from a district court decision enjoining them from enforcing a state rule that infringed the free speech rights of Pennsylvania attorneys.
The settlement and fee request would provide only 30% of the funds to class members, 25% to attorneys, 5% to the settlement administrator and about 40% or $16 million to third party organizations, called cy pres. The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to the diversion of class funds.
Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute is hiring an attorney! And it’s a dream job for the sort of lawyer for whom this is a dream job.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Washington, DC – A federal court based in Philadelphia today preliminarily enjoined enforcement of a Rule of Professional Conduct aimed at disciplining attorneys for their speech. HLLI challenged Rule 8.4(g) on behalf of attorney Zachary Greenberg, a Pennsylvania-licensed attorney working for a non-profit organization that advocates on behalf of students’ constitutional rights and regularly speaks at legal education and other professional events on a variety of hot-button legal…
Anna St. John of the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute objected to the excessive $87.73 million fee request requested by plaintiffs' counsel, which represents 28.3% of the $310 million “megafund” settlement reached over Apple’s practice of “throttling” processor power in older iPhones.
Class member William Yeatman objected to a settlement that provides no direct benefit to class members but instead pays $1.75 million as “cy pres” to fund the creation of a new non-profit.
Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute (HLLI) announced today the departure of president & general counsel Melissa A. Holyoak, who is leaving to serve as Utah Solicitor General. Holyoak co-founded HLLI with Theodore H. Frank in 2019. HLLI also announced that Anna St. John will serve as its next president.
HLLI successfully filed a civil rights suit against the Disciplinary Board of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania to block implementation of a rule that would limit speech by Pennsylvania-licensed attorneys. HLLI unsuccessfully appealed to the Supreme Court concerning the revised rule that replaces the one already found to be unconstitutional.
“I’m confident that one day this decade a different court of appeals will disagree with one of those Posner opinions, the Supreme Court will take up the circuit split, and then tell us that Posner was right all along,” Frank said.
HLLI filed an amicus brief in support of a shareholder challenging California's discriminatory quota requiring the election of a minimum number of women to the boards of directors of publicly-traded companies.
