/>iThe saga of Drazen continues and the fallout is far and wide in the TCPAWorld.
For the uninitiated, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals recently BLASTED TCPA plaintiffs lawyers for selling a class down the river by negotiating for extra fees for themselves while allowing over 90% of class members to receive nothing as part of a TCPA settlement. The Court found the counsel was at odds with the class it was set to represent and deemed them inadequate as counsel.
Except, maybe it didn’t.
In an unusual clarification order entered by the same panel over a month later the court has now clarified that only a small–and fairly non-impactful–portion of the ruling addressing coupon settlements was actually the holding. The rest, it seems, was just for fun and ridicule.
Still, the shadow of the ruling looms large in TCPAWorld where settlements often result in large reverters to defendants–who always want to pay as little as possible–and even larger fee awards to plaintiff’s lawyers–who always want to make as much as possible.
Well a new ruling in Williams v. Choice Health Care, Case No. 1:23-cv-292-RAH, Doc. 46 (M.D. Al. July 22, 2024) suggests the reveter deals are not as gone and dead as Drazen made it seem.
In Williams Choice Health agreed to a $7MM TCPA settlement. Except it only agreed to pay members of the class who actually made a claim in the settlement process. There were 276,000 class members– but only 2% of them (5,520) made a claim.
First, that means over 271,000 class members received NOTHING out of this settlement–but still gave up a valuable full release to the defendant.
Second, those who did make a claim received about $35.00. That means Choice Health only paid about $200k to the class.
So where did the rest of the $7MM go?
Well $2.1MM went to attorneys fees-including to the Wolf, who just made himself another nice kill. And a couple hundred thousand went to administrate the class.
The rest? Back to the Defendant.
So that means this $7MM deal was actually only a ~$2.5MM deal in disguise–and $2.1MM of that (84%) went to feed the Plaintiff’s lawyers!
That is how the sausage is made in TCPAWorld, and that is what the Court in Drazen was so upset about. But since this was not a coupon settlement, Drazen did not matter–in fact the Court in Williams did not even mention Drazen in its ruling.
Very very interesting.
Now, in fairness there was some injunctive relief awarded here which does have some value. Still though, this is a lot of money for lawyers and only about 76 cents in actual money to each class member on average (if my arithmetic holds up.)
So is Drazen still a big problem for TCPA settlements? Or was it a momentary hiccup that has passed with the passage of time?
We shall see.
