At first glance, it looks like a total rip-off. Class members in a settlement involving deceptively marketed Duracell batteries collected just $345,000, but their lawyers got a whopping $5.7 million in fees.
The Center for Class Action Fairness in December filed a cert petition with the U.S. Supreme Court. “This case is an object lesson in how the class action mechanism can go wrong,” wrote Thomas Goldstein of Goldstein & Russell for the center, founded by tort reformer Theodore Frank and part of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
