Yesterday, the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit dismissed a settlement agreement reached in a class action case citing a laundry list of what it said were conflicts of interest on the part
of the plaintiff lawyers and inequities in the agreement itself, which the court called "scandalous."
“Class counsel sold out the class,” Judge Richard A. Posner wrote for a
three-member panel of the court. The case is called Eubank v. Pella Corp. and the opinion is available here. The Legal Ethics Forum has links to comments on the story here.
Unfortunately, issues of inequities in class action representation are not a new problem. Richard Zitrin and Carol Langford have a very good chapter on the subject in their book "The Moral Compass of the American Lawyer."
