folo

After three appeals of objections to a class action settlement, Judge Posner of the Seventh Circuit has had it.  In rejecting appeal round #3, he calls the objectors and their lawyers everything but a child of God.

To quickly sketch in some background, the suit involved a lender, who among their alleged predator practices, was selling bundles of information about their borrowers to third parties.  One group of subclass had not been directly injured by the information sale; the question in all three appeals was the extent to which they could be cut out of a recovery yet have any claims precluded.  Judge Posner wrote:

We are disheartened that the litigation by the information-sharing class has been allowed to draw on for eight years, when it has no merit– and that as a matter of law, without need to take evidence. It is an example of the typical pathology of class action litigation, which is riven with conflicts of interest… The lawyers for the class could not concede the utter worthlessness of their claim because they wanted an award of attorneys’ fees. The lawyers for Fleet were reluctant to argue the utter worthlessness of the claim because they were able to negotiate a settlement that cost their client virtually nothing– provided they did not take such a strong stand that it jeopardized the class lawyers’ shot at a generous award of attorneys’ fees….”

Where Judge Posner truly snaps is in dealing with the objectors’ fee request– the district court had found a smallish fee supported but then cut it in half for misconduct by the objectors:

With what can only be described as chutzpah, defined by Leo Rosten as ‘gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible ‘guts,’ presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to,’ the objectors [to the class settlement] ask us to substitute them for the lawyers for the information-sharing class and award them the entire $750,000 in attorneys fees…awarded those lawyers….”  The opinion describes the objectors’ “lack of constructive activity in the district court.

The opinion ends:

The improvement that the objectors produced in this case, minus the detriment caused by their courtroom antics, barely justified the modest fee that the judge awarded them.

This case is finito.

H/t to the How Appealing blog.