Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a decision that highlights a growing disagreement among federal appellate courts as to whether class action settlements may include a cash incentive award to...more
The First Circuit recently reversed the District of Massachusetts’s approval of a settlement award that improperly lacked any subclasses within the 4.8-million-person putative class, finding it “too difficult to determine...more
When negotiating a class action settlement, lawyers on both sides may need to consider whether subgroups within the class need to be separately represented by different counsel. The First Circuit recently reached that...more
More than two years ago, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Johnson v. NPAS Solutions, LLC, 975 F.3d 1244 (11th Cir. 2020) that incentive payments for lead plaintiffs in class-action lawsuits are improper. After...more
Two years ago, in Johnson v. NPAS Solutions, LLC, the Eleventh Circuit upended decades’ worth of precedent by categorically forbidding incentive payments to class representatives in class action settlements...more
A recent Ninth Circuit decision on a class action settlement, In re Apple Inc. Device Performance Litigation, 2022 WL 4492078 (9th Cir. Sept. 28, 2022), received significant attention in the legal media. It addressed several...more
It’s been almost two years since a divided panel of the Eleventh Circuit held that incentive payments (a/k/a service awards) in class action settlements are unlawful, a startling and controversial result given the ubiquity of...more
For decades, Plaintiffs and defendants have fought bitterly over most aspects of class-action law. One issue, however, had managed to escape serious contention: the propriety of paying “incentive awards” (also known as...more
The Eleventh Circuit recently decided not to rehear en banc a panel decision which held that a TCPA class action settlement could not include an incentive award for the lead plaintiff. See Johnson v. NPAS Sols., LLC, No....more
Last week, the Eleventh Circuit declined, 7–4, to reconsider en banc a divided panel’s September 2020 decision barring incentive awards to class representatives for their work in class actions. As such, the Eleventh Circuit...more
The plaintiff in Alvarez v. Sunshine Life & Health Advisors LLC - the first Florida Telephone Solicitation Act (FTSA) action to settle on a class basis - filed his motion for preliminary approval of the settlement. And the...more
Motions To Strike Class Allegations: Here To Stay or Going out of Style? By their nature, class actions, given the prospect of classwide liability and potentially millions (if not billions) in aggregated damages, are...more
In Part I of this post, we examined the problem with incentive awards to class representatives and the conflict of interest that it creates between class representatives and the class they seek to represent. Recently, the...more
Time and time again this scenario repeats itself and necessarily begs the question: Who is supposed to be protecting the interests of the absent class members in these settlements—class counsel who is taking more than 30% of...more
A few months ago, I posted about a surprising decision of a divided panel of the Eleventh Circuit which held that incentive awards (a/k/a “service awards”) in class action settlements are prohibited by arguably analogous...more
On September 18, 2020, we wrote an article discussing how the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Johnson v. NPAS Solutions, LLC, No. 18-12344 (11th Cir. 2020) held that class action incentive payments...more
Last month, in a split decision, the Eleventh Circuit reversed a district court’s incentive award to the named plaintiff in a class action alleging willful violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. In doing so, it...more
In Johnson v. NPAS Sols., LLC, No. 18-12344 (11th Cir. Sep. 17, 2020), the Eleventh Circuit (the “Court”) found a series of errors in an order entered by the Southern District of Florida approving the settlement of a class...more
In a split decision, the 11th Circuit rejected a $6,000 incentive award for the named plaintiff in a TCPA class action. According to the majority in Johnson v. NPAS Solutions, LLC, U.S. Supreme Court precedent prohibits such...more
SEC Charges Trust Company with Operating Unregistered Investment Companies and Failing to Register Securities Offerings. On September 30, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced it had settled charges with...more
On September 17, 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit issued a bombshell decision: A court may not award an incentive fee to a class representative. This is surprising, if not shocking, as it is standard...more
On September 17, 2020, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals (Eleventh Circuit) issued an important decision regarding incentive payments in class-action settlements in Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) cases. In...more
In a split decision, the Eleventh Circuit rejected a $6,000 incentive award for the named plaintiff in a TCPA class action. According to the majority in Johnson v. NPAS Solutions, LLC, U.S. Supreme Court precedent prohibits...more
In a decision that may have far-reaching consequences, a divided panel of the Eleventh Circuit ruled that incentive awards to named plaintiffs—which are routine in TCPA and other class action settlements—are improper. See...more
In a surprising opinion, the Eleventh Circuit politely pointed out that “The Emperor has no clothes.” A common practice in class actions is for class representatives to claim and settling defendants to pay incentive awards....more