There’s a great article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal by Ashby Jones, and I don’t say that only because it profiles Ted Frank, the brilliant, handsome fellow who sends me a paycheck every month. It’s about the Center for Class Action Fairness LLC, the public interest legal program where I serve as senior counsel.
Here’s what we do. The idea behind a class action settlement is that a large group (a “class”) of people has been treated badly; the settlement is supposed to combine all the potential lawsuits into one master suit, compensate the class and end all related litigation. The center gets involved in (technically, “objects to”) bad settlements which betray the interests of the class.
After all, a bad settlement will accomplish little or nothing for the people that should benefit from it—the center has successfully objected to bad settlements that produce valueless or nearly valueless compensation for the class, such as coupons that require class members to do business with the offending defendant in the future in order to benefit from the settlement.
In the meantime, class action settlements often create huge paydays for the lawyers, who are supposed to funnel most of the benefits of the settlement to the class, but instead may receive payments of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars. The goal of the Center for Class Action Fairness is to ensure that the members of the class, not just their lawyers, are treated reasonably.
