Dewey v. Volkswagen, Water Ingress Settlement objection response briefing
Today we filed our response brief; plaintiffs largely ignored the arguments we made earlier and instead made ad hominem complaints about some quotes that I gave a legal newspaper—when they weren’t simply lying about what relevant Third Circuit precedent said.
The Dewey case presents an excellent example of the misuse of economic expert testimony to falsely exaggerate class benefit. Double-count a class benefit here, ignore an offsetting cost there, presume 100% class response, and before you know it, you can tell the court that an $8 million settlement fund is really worth over $140 million and that you’re entitled to a $2900/hour fee award totaling over $23 million. (And before you do the math and calculate the over-$5M/year the plaintiffs’ lawyers seem to think they’re entitled to, consider that they’re also asking for over $1000/hour for their associates, whom they are most certainly not paying $2M/year.)