Comments on: Labor and employment roundup https://www.overlawyered.com/2018/04/labor-and-employment-roundup-15/ Chronicling the high cost of our legal system Sat, 05 May 2018 10:51:23 +0000 hourly 1 By: MattS https://www.overlawyered.com/2018/04/labor-and-employment-roundup-15/comment-page-1/#comment-348708 Sat, 05 May 2018 10:51:23 +0000 https://www.overlawyered.com/?p=68669#comment-348708 “but 1/3 to the lawyers means that the “damages” paid by Ralph Lauren were only about $450 per intern.”

Per the linked article, it was $305 per intern.

“We need a loser-pays system, where the innocent defendant has a strong motivation to go to trial, and the plaintiff with a poor case has good reason to never file a suit in the first place, or to drop it as soon as discovery turns up problems in the case.”

How would that work with a class-action suit?

Are there any loser pays systems out there that allow class-action suits? How do they handle that?

]]> By: markm https://www.overlawyered.com/2018/04/labor-and-employment-roundup-15/comment-page-1/#comment-348707 Fri, 04 May 2018 23:15:35 +0000 https://www.overlawyered.com/?p=68669#comment-348707 Hugo, it’s not the most abusive class-action settlement (for the clients) by far, but 1/3 to the lawyers means that the “damages” paid by Ralph Lauren were only about $450 per intern. Unless the average intern only worked a few weeks, that seems very low – like the lawyers who filed suit rate their chances of winning at trial as rather low, but the company decided to pay them $108K to just go away. The clients did better than most because there are hundreds of them, rather than the tens or hundreds of thousands in a coupon settlement – but it sounds more like the clients are splitting 2 times what the lawyers wanted to get, than that they’re getting 2/3 of what they deserve.

IMO,filing a poorly-founded case in order to extort a small settlement is abusive of the legal system and the defendants. We need a loser-pays system, where the innocent defendant has a strong motivation to go to trial, and the plaintiff with a poor case has good reason to never file a suit in the first place, or to drop it as soon as discovery turns up problems in the case.

]]> By: Hugo S Cunningham https://www.overlawyered.com/2018/04/labor-and-employment-roundup-15/comment-page-1/#comment-348606 Fri, 27 Apr 2018 12:23:00 +0000 https://www.overlawyered.com/?p=68669#comment-348606 The Ralph Lauren class action settlement–

Maybe the original lawsuit was overhyped, but the payout is less objectionable than many. The class plaintiffs are being paid real money rather than worthless coupons, and the standard 33% commission to the lawyers is based on actual payouts rather than inflated nominal value of coupons.

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