My apologies for missing last Thursday’s post: life with a newborn occasionally catches up with one. Nonetheless, finishing out our July Class Action Summer Camp, today we’ll focus on Rule 23(e) and class-action settlements. The vast majority of class actions settle, but because class-action settlements implicate so many different interests (the lawyers, the defendant

Last Friday, Thomson/Reuters reporter Alison Frankel (who should be on every class-action lawyer’s RSS feed) wrote about an example of a new strategy class-action defendants have developed over the past few years. That strategy? Work with the government. In this case, publishers Harper Collins and Hachette–two of the defendants in both the Justice Department’s recent

Cardozo law professor Lester Brickman has been a longtime critic of the contingency fee system. So it’s no surprise that his latest work, Lawyer Barons: What Their Contingency Fees Really Cost America (introduction here), has a lot to say about how contingency fees skew the incentives of plaintiffs’ lawyers. Among the most interesting observations