Author: Gibbons P.C.

There have been a flurry of federal appellate court decisions this year and last scrutinizing and overturning class settlements (see In re HP Inkjet Printer Litig. and Radcliffe v. Experian, merely by way of example). That trend continued on August 2, 2013, with In re Dry Max Pampers Litigation, a case involving Pampers marketed with “Dry Max technology,” where the Sixth Circuit upset a settlement awarding class counsel $2.73 million in attorneys’ fees and the named plaintiffs $1,000 “per ‘affected child.’” The Court found it offered the class representatives and class counsel “preferential treatment” at the expense of unnamed class members, who received nothing save what the Sixth Circuit characterized as “worthless injunctive relief.” Though the latest decisions out of the Third and Seventh Circuits addressing the bona fides of attorneys’ fee awards in class settlements — see Kirsch v. Delta Dental and Silverman v. Motorola — held that the deals there passed muster, both sides of the bar would be well served by taking note of what went wrong in In re Dry Max.