On May 6, 2024, Legal Director Ross Weiner attended the 8th Annual Class Action Money & Ethics Conference at the Harmonie Club in New York City. Ross moderated a lively panel on fraud in class actions that featured Rebecca Gilliland (Beasley Allen), Kyle Mason (EisnerAmper), Franco Corrado (Morgan Lewis), Jeff Wilkerson (Winston & Strawn), and Etia Rottman Frand (Darrow). The panel discussed many hot-button topics including:
- How best to draft class action settlement documents to combat fraud;
- Which types of settlement notice yield the highest levels of fraud;
- The promise and pitfalls of digital payments; and
- How technology can be utilized to mitigate fraud.
The rest of the conference featured engaging conversation on an array of topics related to class actions. Of particular interest were the following observations:
- While wiretapping class actions possess an interesting legal theory, the dearth of case law and abundance of private settlements have made it hard to predict how these cases will perform in the long run should they go to trial and beyond.
- The presence and threat of mass arbitrations are impacting how companies settle their class actions, with more importance given to certain “blow” provisions and termination rights.
- There is serious concern about how much verification goes into plaintiff’s counsel’s claims re the number of “clients” it represents in a mass arbitration. But the more defendants that settle these cases early, the less incentive plaintiff’s counsel has to spend time, money, and effort on vetting.