Navigating Disputes Within Your Health Care Practice
Law School Toolbox Podcast Episode 388: Listen and Learn – Policy Exclusions (Evidence)
State AG Pulse | Money, Money, Money: Where does it go and why?
Sending Up the Mediation Smoke Signal: Tools that Policyholders Have Available to Settle A Claim With A Recalcitrant Insurer
What to do When Your Business Has Been Sued
Settling a Claim: Get Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable
What Will Happen at My Mediation?
Lawyers involved with a proposed multi-billion-dollar settlement of three athlete-compensation antitrust cases against the NCAA and the Power Five conferences filed documents on Thursday that included small, but potentially...more
In a welcome win for employers, the California Supreme Court recently blocked a PAGA plaintiff’s attempt to intervene and object to another PAGA plaintiff’s proposed settlement as a matter of right, in Turrieta v. Lyft, Inc.,...more
Consumers frequently receive only a paltry fraction of class action settlement funds, which are instead doled out to plaintiffs’ lawyers, cy pres recipients, and administrators. Now this problem is compounded by a recent...more
At the close of 2023, the Supreme Court dismissed the appeal of petitioner Acheson in Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer as moot and vacated the underlying decision by the First Circuit that Laufer had constitutional standing to...more
On October 18, Judge Rebecca Beach Smith of the Eastern District of Virginia approved a $70 million settlement in an antitrust case, with more than $23.3 million awarded to the plaintiffs’ attorneys. This case helpfully...more
As total adjudication is a lofty finish line for many mass and class disputes, settlement is a crucial factor. As class actions continue to rise in prominence in the UK, the United States offers many lessons to emulate and...more
The redress action allows consumer associations to collectively sue companies for performance claims of consumers. The law comes into force in October 2023. What does the redress action mean for the companies that could...more
Takeaway: When evaluating the fairness of a proposed class settlement, Federal Rule 23(e)(2) requires a district court to take into account, among other considerations, the terms of any proposed award of attorneys’ fees and...more
When you finally reach an agreement to settle a hotly contested class action, you want more than anything for the court to approve your settlement agreement and for the case to be over. But, to get to the end of the case,...more
On December 16, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit made two important findings in a class-action settlement case. First, the Court vacated the district court’s settlement approval finding that the...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
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
Last week the Eleventh Circuit addressed an issue that many class action practitioners probably haven’t thought much about: whether approval of a class action settlement requires that each class member obtaining relief have...more
Everyone remember that Alvarez v. Sunshine Life & Health Advisors LLC putative Florida Telephone Solicitation Act (FTSA) litigation we’ve covered? You know, the one where the plaintiff’s counsel argued that the FTSA extends...more
The sun is shining, children are out of school, families are headed off on summer vacations, and the SEC is … bringing enforcement actions against companies for 2020 fraud related to COVID-19 products. One such action was...more
Certain class action settlements—like employment and consumer settlements—will very often draw objections from absent class members. But other types of settlements with more sophisticated absent class members—like antitrust...more
Parties in another false advertising case surrounding the use of the term “natural” have filed for preliminary approval of a class action settlement. On May 7, 2021, the plaintiff in Megan Holve v. McCormick & Company, Inc.,...more
Parties in an added-sugar class action pending in the Northern District of California are taking another shot at obtaining preliminary approval of a settlement reached between the parties. The case, Stephen Hadley et al. v....more
The 11th Circuit recently addressed the issue of competing or overlapping class actions, which often create problems for both the plaintiffs’ counsel and the defense. In Medical and Chiropractic Clinic, Inc. v. Oppenheim, the...more
In the sprawling National Prescription Opiate Litigation (MDL 2804), proponents of a “negotiation class” recently asked the Sixth Circuit for en banc review of a September 2020 decision that struck down the novel class...more
The author presented the following paper at the 2020 Class Actions National Institute of the American Bar Association. What makes mediating a class action different from mediating an individual case? In both settings,...more
The Sixth Circuit recently addressed whether a novel negotiation class could be certified to facilitate possible future settlement negotiations in multidistrict litigation (MDL)....more
Seyfarth Synopsis: “Objector blackmail” occurs in the class settlement approval process when a few class members object to a proposed settlement and, after the district court has overruled their objections, pursue appeals...more
When a class action settlement is proposed for approval, the class members have three options, (1) they can remain in the settlement class, (2) opt-out of the settlement to preserve their individual claims, or (3) they can...more
As I have discussed in earlier posts, there are multiple stakeholders to class action settlements, including named plaintiffs, absent class members, class counsel, defendants, and the courts. Conflicts can arise within some...more