Class Actions

D.C. Lawyers Screw Up E-discovery So Badly, It’s ‘Literally Unheard Of’

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If you read a lot of e-discovery articles — and I know y’all do — you know that judges are quickly losing any patience for attorneys who don’t have their act together during e-discovery (or even regular old discovery).

I know that nothing about the process is simple or easy. I know e-discovery is expensive and time-consuming and involves complex computer programs that most people don’t understand. But seriously, everyone needs to hurry up and figure this stuff out.

Otherwise you might end up like the attorneys for the city of Washington, D.C., who got benchslapped so hard on Monday that they won’t be able to see straight for a week.

Read on to learn about what Chief Judge Royce Lamberth (D.D.C.) described as a discovery abuse “so extreme as to be literally unheard of”….

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Quote of the Day: And you thought you billed a lot of hours….

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[Lawyer Dennis] Gingold claims to have billed an astonishing 48,772 hours on this case—which works out to almost 9.5 hours a day, every day without a single day off, between November 4, 1995, and December 7, 2009. This includes a seven-year stretch where Mr. Gingold billed 28,230 hours—an average of eleven hours a day, every day seven days a week without a single day off.

As anyone who has had to keep billing records knows, it is rare for ten hours of billing to take only ten hours: there are bathroom breaks, coffee breaks, meal breaks, interruptions, and so forth. There are legendary accounts of tireless attorneys who forgo family and leisure; work on little sleep; and are able to regularly bill 3000 hours a year, but they are few and far between. Perhaps Mr. Gingold is one of these exceptional individuals, so far above average that he can routinely bill 4000 hours a year without loss of productivity or health, but this proposition merits scrutiny.

– Ted Frank, founder of the Center for Class Action Fairness, in a brief objecting to the proposed $3.4 billion, taxpayer-funded Cobell Indian trust settlement. The settlement includes a fee request in which solo practitioner Dennis Gingold claims to have billed over 28,000 hours in seven years — at his hourly rate of $925 an hour.

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Lawsuit of the Day: Liberal Bloggers v. Arianna Huffington

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The high priestess of liberal blogging: Arianna Huffington.

The gorgeous and glamorous Arianna Huffington, reigning empress of the liberal blogosphere, has been sued by some of her not-so-loyal subjects.

This morning, a group of unpaid bloggers for the Huffington Post, led by union organizer and journalist Jonathan Tasini, filed a class-action lawsuit against the HuffPo; its foundress, La Arianna; and media giant AOL, which bought HuffPo back in February. The gist of the lawsuit, as Tasini told Jeff Bercovici of Forbes, is that the site’s unpaid writers “must share in the value they create” — $315 million worth of value, based on what AOL paid for the Huffington Post.

As a writer myself, I’m all in favor of writers being paid for what they do. But the lawsuit against HuffPo strikes me as a bit dubious….

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Hackers Probably Stole Your Email Address Last Weekend

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Raise your hand if you are a JPMorgan Chase customer. Now raise your hand if you’ve shopped at Best Buy. How about Citibank, Target or Walgreens?

Has everybody in the world raised their hands yet? Congratulations — your email address may have been stolen.

There was a data breach at Epsilon, a Texas-based marketing firm, last weekend, exposing the names and email addresses of potentially millions of their clients’ customers. I first found out about it when Chase emailed me. You might have gotten a similar alert from one of the affected companies.

Read part of the bank’s announcement and more about the breach, after the jump.

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Dukes Proving To Be a Hazard to Wal-Mart

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In 1995, Betty Dukes took a job at a Wal-Mart near San Francisco, working as a cashier and greeter for $5 an hour. A “greeter” represents the face of the company as consumers walk through the door. Little did Dukes and Wal-Mart know that Dukes would ultimately become a face of Wal-Mart nationally, under much different circumstances. 

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Wal-Mart v. Dukes. Dukes is now the lead plantiff in a gender bias suit that may become the largest class action in American history, with attorneys for Dukes seeking to represent a class of possibly 1.6 million women. SCOTUS will be determining if the plaintiff cases against Wal-Mart are sufficiently related for them to be certified as a class. 

So what does this have to do with legal technology, which is what I cover for ATL? Everything. And no matter what the court decides, the legal and technological ramifications of this case do not bode well for the retail giant… 

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Non-Sequiturs: 03.25.11

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* Who are the top plaintiffs firms in securities class-action litigation, ranked by 2010 total settlement value? [RiskMetrics / SCAS via WSJ Law Blog]

* Protip: if you go to a meeting at Deutsche Bank’s New York offices, avoid the men’s room. [Dealbreaker]

* This lawyer has an assistant with an unusual name. [Abuse of Discretion]

* We were impressed by the University of Chicago Law School’s new loan repayment assistance program (LRAP) — and we’re not alone. [The Belly of the Beast]

* Dov Charney’s latest accuser, Kimbra Lo, has an interesting past. Yes, there are pics. [Fashionista]

* You know the whole “anti-bullying” trend has gone too far when plaintiffs’ firms are setting up practice areas for it. [Constitutional Daily]

* Career alternatives for attorneys: meet Akila McConnell, traveler and writer. [Thrillable Hours / Legal Nomads]

* Is the “mommy track” a form of gender bias? [Lawyerist]

* Are prosecutors working on commission in one Colorado district? [ABA Journal]

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Taco Bell Launches Meaty Offensive Over Its Beef

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Earlier this week, we told you about a class action lawsuit filed against Taco Bell over its taco fillings. The lawsuit alleges that Taco Bell inaccurately claims to be selling “seasoned beef” when in fact it is selling “taco meat filling.”

We didn’t think Taco Bell would take these allegations lying down. The WSJ Law Blog tells us that Taco Bell lawyers are thinking outside the bun box and contemplating a countersuit.

But today brings news of a more traditional response from the fast food giant: an all-out media blitz to assure customers about the quality of its food.

Taco Bell is issuing press releases, taking out full-page ads in newspapers, and even has their president talking about the Taco Bell “seasoned beef” recipe on YouTube. Sadly, Taco Bell isn’t available on SeamlessWeb here at the office — so I can talk about the ad campaign, but can’t experience it in my belly…

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You Didn’t Really Think You Were Eating ‘Beef’ at Taco Bell, Did You?

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I’m not going to lie: I love Taco Bell. It’s my favorite fast food. One of the most consistently annoying aspects of my life is that I’ve never lived near a Taco Bell. I always have to go out of my way to get it.

Now, generally my wife and I learn how to cook things that we like but don’t have easy access to. I can turn my kitchen into a lobster holocaust zone. We buy beef and grind it ourselves to make Shake Shack burgers. I’ve even once had a chef from a restaurant in Vegas email me a recipe of a dish I particularly enjoyed.

But I’ve never, ever come close to recreating the taste of a Taco Bell taco. Oh, I can make tacos, and they are tasty, but I can’t get the Taco Bell thing right.

Now I know why. I’m using real beef. Taco Bell is apparently using… something else…

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Class Action Lawyers Were Generous to Apple This Christmas

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Image representing iPhone as depicted in Crunc...

You may want to download a class action tracking app to your iPhone

It’s always sad when two people give you the same present for Christmas — especially if it’s not a present you want. That’s the situation Apple is in this holiday season, hit with two lawsuits in federal court last week, both seeking class action certification, for helping advertisers create profiles of iPhone and iPad users.

Lalo v. Apple, first reported by Businessweek, and Freeman v. Apple, first reported by Wired, were both filed on Thursday, Dec. 23, in the Northern District of California. The first was filed by Kamber Law, the team behind the $2.4 million Quantcast “zombie cookie” settlement, and the second by three law firms, including the one that recently sued YouPorn over its “history sniffing.”

Both lawsuits are essentially copy-and-paste jobs of a recent Wall Street Journal article about how smartphones spy on their users. The WSJ report detailed how apps on iPhones and Android phones gather personal information, including location, gender, age, contacts, and a phone’s unique identifier, and then pass that information along to advertisers. The suits focus on Apple’s disclosing iPhone and iPad users’ Unique Device ID (UDID) — basically a mobile device’s social security number, which, when disclosed, can be used to profile a Machead.

Re-gifting alert: since this occurs on the Android as well, Google may want to look out for a belated class action present. “We usually take the most meritorious action first and then work our way down,” says Majed Nachawati, one of the class action attorneys in the Freeman complaint. “Google is on the radar, but we haven’t taken any action against them yet.”

Read on at Forbes.com.

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Racial Quotas? So Ordered! (Or, Judge of the Day: Harold Baer)

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We’ve come a long way from the days when federal courts issued orders banning racial discrimination. Now federal judges hand down orders mandating, or at least encouraging, race-based discrimination.

As reported in the American Lawyer, earlier this week Judge Harold Baer (S.D.N.Y.) issued an unusual order. On Monday, Judge Baer directed two firms serving as lead counsel in a securities class action to “make every effort” to staff the case with at least one minority and one woman:

ORDERED that Co-Lead Counsel, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP and Labaton Sucharow LLP, shall make every effort to assign to this matter at least one minority lawyer and one woman lawyer with requisite experience….

If federal judges can run school districts and prison systems, law firms should be a piece of cake, right?

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