Tech giants’ Payouts Go to Everyone but Affected Citizens. US Supremes Now Urged to Sort it Out

The Register profiles the Gaos v. Google class action fairness case: 

A group of 16 US state attorneys general are urging America’s Supreme Court to tear up an $8.5m legal settlement from Google – because none of the cash will go to the folks the class-action lawsuit was brought on behalf of.

Led by the attorney general of Arizona, Mark Brnovich, the legal eagles have taken issue with the fact that $2.125m of the settlement will go in fees to the attorneys that brought the case and the remaining $5.3m will be split between seven organizations, agreed to by the lawyers and Google.

Three of the seven are law schools that the attorneys’ attended – Harvard University, Stanford University and the Chicago-Kent College of Law – and the remaining four are among Google’s favorite institutions who do work that benefit the tech giant and which the company already supplies millions to – AARP, Carnegie Mellon University, the MacArthur Foundation, and the World Privacy Forum.

The settlement is opposed by the people who brought the case: a fact noted by the attorneys general who see it as an ideal test case, and want to see the Supreme Court impose a set of rules for future class-action lawsuits that put citizens first and prevent lawyers from diverting payouts to recipients of their choosing.