Think Tank Claims Attorneys Bilked VW Claimants Out Of Hundreds Of Millions

The Daily Caller reports on CEI's Center for Class Action Fairness's objection to the Volkswagen emissions settlement. 

Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) filed an objection Friday with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claiming attorneys managed to sucker litigants in the VW case out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Attorneys in the case “provided insufficient information” regarding the cost of legal fees, which, according to the court document, could total nearly $332.5 million. Legal costs could have been reduced by as much as 90 percent, potentially adding millions more to the case had it operated under a competitive bidding process.

CEI also stated that attorneys told litigants they couldn’t win the case if they “opt out.” The same benefits are available for those in the case through settlements with the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.

“Dozens of law firms colluded instead of competed and will now seek thousands of dollars an hour for providing class members what Volkswagen and the government would have provided anyway, perhaps even sooner than the class-action process would have,” Ted Frank, director of CEI’s Center for Class Action Fairness, said in a press release on the group’s website.

“And, it’s ironic,” he added, “that lawyers in a consumer-fraud suit are misleading the public and the media by calling this a $10 billion settlement when the actual value to consumers will be a small fraction of that.”

Read the full article at The Daily Caller.