I’ve been busy this week with a number of things, but a few of them, including the upcoming amendments to Rule 23 and prepping for a Strafford webinar on Thursday, have me thinking about the proper role of objectors again.

I think I’ve mentioned before that a number of class action lawyers (especially on

In August, while we were all on vacation, beating the heat, or recovering from a busy first half of 2016, the Advisory Committee published the new proposed Rule 23 for public comment.
The proposed changes here fall into several categories:
Notice.  Rule 23’s notice provision gets amended to allow for technological change.
Preliminary

Year-end lists are funny things.  They take a sort-of arbitrary starting and stopping point, and then they cram a bunch of prejudices into a (usually) arbitrary number of items.  And then people take them kind of seriously.  But they can be handy ways of catching trends one did not see before.  And in a year

ExxonMobil recently attempted to settle a class action involving the payment of gas royalties. As part of that settlement, it agreed to a provision that would impose a severe appeal bond on any objectors who might wish to appeal an unsuccessful objection. The clause read:

Because any appeal by an objecting Class Member would delay

Just about anyone who owns a printer has strong opinions on toner cartridges. An enterprising group of plaintiffs’ lawyers sought to capitalize on consumer annoyance with printer cartridges by filing three class actions in the Northern District of California against toner manufacturer Hewlett Packard.

Their cases didn’t go so well. Some of the complaints

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