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This blog scans breaking news to find significant and interesting legal settlements. Lawyer.com is a directory website for lawyers. Featuring the best search in its field, lawyer.com connects people who need legal advice to the most qualified professionals who can provide it.

Business v. Class Action

How much are you signing away to get that sweet, sweet 1994 Toyota Tercel?

An article in the New York Times caught my attention today. It’s about the fallout from the 2011 Supreme Court decision in AT&T v. Concepcion, which stated that corporations can write clauses into contracts to prevent class action lawsuits. To do this, the clauses require customers to settle disputes through arbitration (instead of in an actual court of law) and to relinquish their right to litigate as a class. In effect, the contracts waive the customers’ right to due process. Since that decision, the legal world has changed. For the better or for worse?

Keep reading the full post to see what’s up with these clauses and to learn a tip on how to get around them.

Maternity Leave No Reason to Discriminate for Mortgage Insurer

Maternity v. Mortgage

The mortgage insurer MGIC Investment Group has settled a federal lawsuit alleging that they refused to sell mortgage insurance to women on maternity leave. The suit claimed that the company required 70 women to return to work before they would sell them the insurance, which “allows homebuyers to take out loans with down payments of less than 20%”, according to the Wall Street Journal. Yesterday, the company settled for $550,000, with $511,000 to be compensation for the women and $39,000 as a civil penalty to the government. In addition, MGIC will have to train its employees on discrimination law and revamp its policies concerning customers on maternity leave. The company has also entered a preliminary settlement in a related class action suit in order to avoid spending any more money on a lawsuit they will likely lose.

Cross to bear

There was something about the Mojave Desert for the Lost Generation. Maybe it was the cool sand-crested wind, the emptiness, an unspoken communion with a greater peace. Those disillusioned soldiers of World War I, still shellshocked, went out there to find quiet — to forget, maybe, or to remember in silence only the stars overhead could provide. In 1934, perhaps because of these troubled men, the Veterans of Foreign Wars built a wooden cross and raised it on a quiet parcel of land there. It was both memorial to the soldiers lost and a reminder to those still living of the enormous cost of the war. The veterans gathered at the cross for barbecues and dances, to come together and share their burdens in the cross’s shadow. It stood there for 67 years, rebuilt with steel at one point, becoming a defining monument for veterans everywhere — separate, in a way, from the religious connotations inherent in the cross’s image. Henry and Wanda Sandoz looked after it, on a promise to the previous caretaker on his deathbed. The cross remained, stoic and silent, until 2001 when a church-and-state lawsuit threatened to take it down.

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What Happens to Unused Class Action Settlement Money?

Justice

We often hear about bigtime class action settlements, the ones with millions of dollars set up in trusts and application processes to benefit from. Like the $325 million Apple antenna lawsuit, or the recent $3 million Nutella settlement. In these types of settlements, the number of people affected by them (the “class”) is unknown, so the settlement money is put into a fund and a time period is given in which class members can sign up to receive some of the money from that fund. The total settlement award that we read about in the papers, however, is actually an upper bound. That’s the limit — once it’s reached, it’s hard cheese for any more people who want to benefit. Very rarely is the full amount given out. More often, the upper bound is not reached and some money is left sitting in the trust. What happens to this money?

Citizens Pays $132.5 Million for Overdraft Practices

Show me the money

Citizens Financial Group, a bank based in Rhode Island, was accused of unfair business practices in its calculation of overdraft fees for its poorer customers. Instead of processing transactions in the chronological order they were created, the bank elected to process them from largest to smallest. This increased the likeliness and amount of overdraft fees, which are levied when a customer spends more money than he/she has in the bank.

Read on to find out exactly how these customers were ripped off

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