palani
8th January 2016, 02:58 PM
Do you see a problem here? The damaged party gets seven pennies while his representative gets 7.8 million? If you can't see a problem bounce the situation off your CPA and see if HE can spot a problem. The post office got paid six times this amount to just mail the letter.
If the guy had direct deposit his settlement would have increased by 600%!!!!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2016/01/08/7-8-million-fee-for-lawyers-7-cent-check-for-one-lucky-class-member/?utm_campaign=yahootix&partner=yahootix
$7.8 Million Fee For Lawyers, 7-Cent Check For One Lucky Class Member
Don’t get Tommy Leonardi wrong: He’s no lawyer-hating opponent of class actions. In fact he thinks class actions probably do some good by deterring companies from misbehaving, and lawyers should be paid for bringing them.
But he’s still puzzled at the check below, which arrived in his mail recently. It’s the Philadelphia resident’s share of a $31 million settlement lawyers negotiated on behalf of some 600,000 property owners who were allegedly overcharged for flood insurance. It equals 7 cents, or roughly one-third of one second’s worth of the time of one of his lead attorneys, who charged the class $750 an hour.
BoA flood check
Leonardi owns a modest home near a flood zone in Philadelphia and he was confused by BoA’s insistence he buy $250,000 in insurance, when the structure on his property was worth far less. Turns out a lot of borrowers had the same question and thus a class action was born. A bunch of them.
The settlement that yielded Leonardi the above check came in the case styled Arnett v. Bank of America in federal court in Oregon. It was bundled with seven other cases over the same claims, mainly that BoA was improperly sharing in the commissions on force-placed flood insurance and ordering borrowers to buy too much of it. The Arnett case was filed in Oregon in November, 2011, while similar suits were filed in Massachusetts, North Carolina and other states in the months before and after. They were consolidated before U.S. District Judge Michael Simon in Portland.
It’s not surprising that multiple law firms would jump on the same class action. What is surprising is that they were all allowed to stay in the case. If it’s about obtaining the best result for their clients, the class members, one would think a single law firm would be better. Fewer lawyers charging $450 to $750 an hour to comb through documents and more importantly, more law firms competing for the business and hopefully driving down the fee.
Recommended by Forbes
That didn’t happen here. Berger & Montague, a prominent Philadelphia class-action firm, shared in the fees along with Stoll Berne in Oregon, Nichols Kaster in Minneapolis, Shapiro Haber & Irmy in Boston and Taus, Cebulash & Landau in New York.
Those lawyers claim they expended 28,000 billable hours going through more than 4 million pages of documents, conducting depositions of seven executives and preparing for multiple mediation sessions to resolve the case. They asked for 30% of the $31 million BoA agreed to pay but Judge Simon cut that down to 25%, saying the results were not extraordinary and the law firms may have expended more time “than is reasonably necessary” because they were pursuing eight different cases until they were consolidated.
The judge didn’t have anything to say about the bigger problem with allowing so many firms to share in the fees. If they are sharing, they aren’t competing with each other, and none of them has an incentive to offer to do the work for less. It’s exactly the type of collusion class-action lawyers sue companies over every day, yet judges don’t seem to understand it can happen in the legal profession as well. Berger & Montague attorneys didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
If the guy had direct deposit his settlement would have increased by 600%!!!!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2016/01/08/7-8-million-fee-for-lawyers-7-cent-check-for-one-lucky-class-member/?utm_campaign=yahootix&partner=yahootix
$7.8 Million Fee For Lawyers, 7-Cent Check For One Lucky Class Member
Don’t get Tommy Leonardi wrong: He’s no lawyer-hating opponent of class actions. In fact he thinks class actions probably do some good by deterring companies from misbehaving, and lawyers should be paid for bringing them.
But he’s still puzzled at the check below, which arrived in his mail recently. It’s the Philadelphia resident’s share of a $31 million settlement lawyers negotiated on behalf of some 600,000 property owners who were allegedly overcharged for flood insurance. It equals 7 cents, or roughly one-third of one second’s worth of the time of one of his lead attorneys, who charged the class $750 an hour.
BoA flood check
Leonardi owns a modest home near a flood zone in Philadelphia and he was confused by BoA’s insistence he buy $250,000 in insurance, when the structure on his property was worth far less. Turns out a lot of borrowers had the same question and thus a class action was born. A bunch of them.
The settlement that yielded Leonardi the above check came in the case styled Arnett v. Bank of America in federal court in Oregon. It was bundled with seven other cases over the same claims, mainly that BoA was improperly sharing in the commissions on force-placed flood insurance and ordering borrowers to buy too much of it. The Arnett case was filed in Oregon in November, 2011, while similar suits were filed in Massachusetts, North Carolina and other states in the months before and after. They were consolidated before U.S. District Judge Michael Simon in Portland.
It’s not surprising that multiple law firms would jump on the same class action. What is surprising is that they were all allowed to stay in the case. If it’s about obtaining the best result for their clients, the class members, one would think a single law firm would be better. Fewer lawyers charging $450 to $750 an hour to comb through documents and more importantly, more law firms competing for the business and hopefully driving down the fee.
Recommended by Forbes
That didn’t happen here. Berger & Montague, a prominent Philadelphia class-action firm, shared in the fees along with Stoll Berne in Oregon, Nichols Kaster in Minneapolis, Shapiro Haber & Irmy in Boston and Taus, Cebulash & Landau in New York.
Those lawyers claim they expended 28,000 billable hours going through more than 4 million pages of documents, conducting depositions of seven executives and preparing for multiple mediation sessions to resolve the case. They asked for 30% of the $31 million BoA agreed to pay but Judge Simon cut that down to 25%, saying the results were not extraordinary and the law firms may have expended more time “than is reasonably necessary” because they were pursuing eight different cases until they were consolidated.
The judge didn’t have anything to say about the bigger problem with allowing so many firms to share in the fees. If they are sharing, they aren’t competing with each other, and none of them has an incentive to offer to do the work for less. It’s exactly the type of collusion class-action lawyers sue companies over every day, yet judges don’t seem to understand it can happen in the legal profession as well. Berger & Montague attorneys didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.