Ninth Circuit appeal in Bluetooth – reply brief
CCAF filed its reply brief in the Bluetooth case yesterday.
CCAF filed its reply brief in the Bluetooth case yesterday.
Earlier this month, plaintiffs and defendants each filed appellees' briefs defending the district court's approval of the Bluetooth settlement against our appeal. We'll be filing our reply brief later this week; stay tuned.
Our appeal has drawn attention from the National Law Journal, Overlawyered, Bob Dorigo Jones, California Civil Justice, Hans Bader, and AetherCzar. It was previously covered in Forbes.
Today, we filed our Ninth Circuit appellate brief in the Bluetooth case, No. 09-56683.
The court's opinion is not quite a rubber-stamp of the defendants' proposed order and opinion, but it's pretty close.
Monday, I attended the fairness hearing for the Bluetooth MDL settlement. UCLA math professor and client Henry Towsner was in the audience. Dozens of people filed objections with the court, but, aside from the CCAF objection, only 12 of those successfully navigated the procedural maze to file a "valid" objection. Out of those, we were the only ones to cite precedent in favor of our objection. And we were the only…
In this case, it's moot: the plaintiffs don't qualify for catalyst theory fees even under California law, and didn't even ask for recovery based on a catalyst theory. So I wouldn't expect the judge to reach it, but there's a law review article out there for someone ambitious.
Yet still, there were class members who did not hear of the settlement until my Overlawyered post publicizing it--a post that comes in for some ad hominem criticism in the plaintiffs' briefs, a classic case of pounding the table.
"If you bought a Bluetooth headset between June 30, 2002 and February 19, 2009, the settlement of a class action lawsuit may affect your rights." And if you want to know why your instruction manuals are overwhelmed with worthless wacky warnings, the settlement of this class action lawsuit may explain why.
In a groundbreaking opinion, the Ninth Circuit held that the court failed to justify the high attorneys’ fees and the questionable settlement provisions that protected those fees. Bluetooth has been cited in hundreds of cases and numerous courts have relied on CCAF's precedent-setting victory.