“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.
Today, Washington Legal Foundation published a short and useful working paper authored by James M. Beck and Rachel B. Weil titled "Cy Pres" Awards: Is the End Near for a Legal Remedy With No Basis in Law?
Ted Frank, a lawyer who also represented a couple in the case, was happy with the court’s decision. He went further to say that the beneficiaries should be the class members, and any settlement should be based on actual recovery and not inflated figures that won’t benefit the class.
CCAF won a tremendous victory for class members in Redman v. Radioshack, just eleven days after oral argument!
The judge allowed the plaintiff lawyers to submit their fee request after the objection period ended, hamstringing objectors including Ted Frank's Center for Class Action Fairness, which nevertheless scored a big win here.
Ted Frank, a critic of what he considers excessive legal fees and who represented a couple opposing the RadioShack settlement, in a phone interview welcomed the decision.
As we discussed earlier, class counsel agreed to a settlement over RadioShack credit-card receipt legality that would have paid themselves $1 million, but the 16-million-member class 83 thousand coupons with a face value of $10.
RadioShack committed the sin of printing credit-card receipts with expiration dates on them, which exposed it to possible liability of $100 a receipt ($1000 if willful), a bankrupting sum. Class counsel settled for coupons. Our clients objected that the settlement did not comply with CAFA's limitations on coupon settlements, and was structured so that class counsel's benefit would outstrip that of the class.
CCAF successfully objected to a settlement that paid $1 million to plaintiffs' lawyers and provided only $830,000 in coupons to class members.
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.
