Rodriguez v. It’s Just Lunch International

Docket number: No. 07-CV-9227 (S.D.N.Y.)

The Center for Class Action Fairness represents class member Michael Barton who successfully objected to a proposed nationwide class action settlement and continues to advise the court about a proposed new settlement.

The original underlying settlement would have paid plaintiffs’ attorneys $3.6 million, while only New York class members recovered any cash. The divergence in recovery between the New York Class and the National Class evidenced a conflict of interest for which class members’ interests were not adequately represented. Even if the Court did not decertify the classes on this ground, Barton argued that the settlement should be rejected as unfair due to the severe disproportion between class counsel’s recovery and class members’ recovery. Other than the $100 recovered by the New York class, class members of both classes would have recovered only a “date voucher,” which the parties valued at $450 but which could not be transferred for any consideration and would have been useless to any class member who is not single or otherwise not interested in using IJL’s date-matching services, and the injunctive relief only even potentially benefits future clients of IJL. Class counsel requested its full lodestar of $3.6 million based on a settlement valuation that assumed an entirely unrealistic 100% claims rate and redemption rate for the date coupons.

On March 10, 2017, in a victory for CCAF, the district court denied approval of the settlement. From the bench, and for many of the reasons discussed in Barton’s objection, the Court observed that the proposed settlement provided little to no benefit to the national class and, thus, class members were better off retaining their rights than settling for the relief provided by the settlement.

As of May 10, 2019, the parties proposed a new settlement agreement, and Barton wrote to the court on May 23 that many of defects of the original settlement still have not been corrected. New York class members continue to have a conflict with class members in other states, and the attorneys’ fee request, though reduced to $1.75 million, is still excessive relative to actual benefits class members might get from the settlement.

Barton again objected to the settlement because non-New Yorkers like him receive payment about one fifteenth of New York class members, and disparate claim value required separate representation to ensure all class members are getting equitably compensated under the law. The district court overruled the objection and approved the new settlement on March 2, 2020.

This case was litigated while the Center for Class Action Fairness ​was a project of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

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