Judge, Reform-Minded Lawyer Crush Latest Class Action Excesses

Newsmax profiles Ted Frank’s work at CEI’s Center for Class Action Fairness.

As outrageous as that is, these types of ridiculous settlements often get approved by the court. That’s starting to change, though.

Thankfully, in recent years, common sense has started to creep back into the resolution of these massive class action lawsuits because of the efforts of reform-minded attorneys like Ted Frank and tough judges like Lucy Koh.

Frank is an attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who, as The Wall Street Journal said in a recent editorial, helped blow the lid off this scam. He did this by doing what he has become well-known for in the legal world since creating the Center for Class Action Fairness several years ago. He derails ridiculous legal settlements that usually fly under the radar of the media long after the initial sensationalistic reporting on the story has passed.

Frank filed an objection to the settlement in federal court and found that the judge in the case appears to be as fed up with these kinds of scams as he is.

As CEI has pointed out, temporary staff attorneys provided “low-level legal work like document review and are typically billed at cost — perhaps $50/hour — to paying clients. Yet parties submitted millions of dollars’ worth of billing for contract attorneys at hundreds of dollars an hour.” Judge Koh admonished the lawyers saying, “I would never have appointed you…had I known you were going to pile on 53 law firms on this case.”

U.S. consumers will benefit at least two ways from the actions of Ted Frank and Judge Koh.

If they were part of the Anthem class action, they will know that their own lawyers won’t be allowed to rip them off by getting ridiculous fees. And, even if they weren’t part of the lawsuit, they will know that fewer class action settlement scams like this are being rubber-stamped today. That’s not only good for consumers, it’s good for job providers who have been targeted in these lawsuits for years.

Read the full article here.