The class in the “Ivy House Gardens” litigation will likely be quite an angry bunch.   According to this report, a lawsuit seeking class action status against the Ivy House Gardens wedding facility was filed in Los Angeles Superior court after the facility abruptly closed in September 2007.  The putative class is

nearly 100 wedding parties who had scheduled events at the home and garden. Brides-to-be paid up to $21,000 in deposits and it is [believed] that the Ivy House Gardens made off with over $1 million….  After hosting weddings for 60 years at the Victorian style home, the Ivy House Gardens closed its doors on September 11, 2007, leaving dozens of wedding parties without a venue, explanation, or refund on their deposits.

Might want to have some security guards present for the depositions!

For those of you trying to keep up with the developing subprime lender lawsuit situation, the D & O Diary has launched this running list of related securities class actions.  As of this morning, the list indicates that 13 separate lenders that have been sued.

The New York Sun had this article last week in which Sen. Hillary Clinton, with "no particular prompting," criticized fellow presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama on the topic of the Class Action Fairness Act.  According to the article,

With no particular prompting, Mrs. Clinton took a veiled swing at Mr. Obama yesterday by boasting about her vote against the Class Action Fairness Act. She called the measure, which became law in 2005 and directs many collective lawsuits to federal court, "just really another way of lining the pockets of big business."

Mr. Obama was one of 18 Senate Democrats to vote for the bill, as was [Sen.] Dodd.

How much does it damage you if the company that is responsible for scoring your SAT examination incorrectly calculates your score on the low end, perhaps by as much as 450 points out of 2,400? 

The College Board and a testing company tasked with scoring exams called NCS Pearson settled a class action last week involving more than 4,000 students whose SAT exams were incorrectly scored in 2005.   According to this article, while the College Board later discovered the error and sent revised scores to colleges, "some students said that the lower scores had affected where they applied and that it was too late to make changes."

The article states that under the proposed settlement, the students in the class "would receive $275 each or possibly more, if they can show they had suffered greater damages."

"The Ethicist," a column by Randy Cohen in yesterday’s Contra Costa Times, addresses this burning class action etiquette question:

Q: Soon after I gave a gift, it was the subject of a recall because of a class-action lawsuit. Am I responsible for passing on the settlement monies or even information to the recipient?

For the answer, click here and scroll down to the last Q&A.

According to this article in the Cincinnati Enquirer, wireless provider TracFone has agreed to settle a class action alleging improper rates by providing free minutes to the class–to be nice.  The article states that "TracFone denied the charges but decided in December to settle rather than fight the suit.   ’We see this as something nice to do for our customers,’ said attorney Jim Baldinger.

Baldinger added that even though TracFone users were on notice of the rates TracFone was charging, "TracFone just decided it made more sense to turn this into a positive and provide a benefit to a large group of customers." 

The article says that if every eligible customer submits a claim, it could cost TracFone up to $70 million.

As discussed here, when the parties to Comes v. Microsoft reached a settlement agreement in that antitrust class action a couple weeks ago, one immediate consequence was that the case website discussed in this post, which featured over 10 hours of videotaped testimony of Bill Gates from the 1998 United States v. Microsoft case as well as copies of sensitive Microsoft emails, suddenly become password-protected and unavailable to the public. 

In the digital age, however, it turns out that isn’t quite that easy to put the genie back in the bottle.  According to this article,

Microsoft lawyers who believed they’d buried the most embarrassing collection of documents about the company’s murky past for good, without any one noticing, were in for a surprise this weekend. The archive has become a mainstay of the Bittorrent P2P file sharing networks.

A healthy 20+ seeds have been distributing the files for the past few days, at any one time.

Blogging about the tentative $49 million settlement in the class action against the BAR/BRI bar review course that is now being challenged by a majority of the class representatives themselves?  Sure, we can do that. 

Going to a movie about people who are studying for the California Bar exam?  Um, no.  No, no, no, no, no.  No can do–I’m pretty sure we’re super busy all of the nights that it is playing. 

(via WSJ Law Blog)

Via the BNA Class Action Litigation Report we stumbled upon the class action settlement in Shen v. Distributive Networks LLC, (N.D. Ill.), which is believed to be "the first class action settlement in a cell phone spam suit."  On January 31, a federal judge in Chicago preliminarily approved a proposed settlement agreement that will provide up to $150 to consumers who received unwanted text messages from any of several Web sites controlled by Distributive Networks ("Astromobo.com,"  "Dailypopgossip.com," Madlovetips.com,"  "dailydoseofblue.com" or "ringstarmobile.com"). 

The settlement applies to unsolicited text messages received between July 17, 2002, and July 17, 2006, and is voidable if more than 1,000 claims are made. The settlement agreement requires Distributive Networks to pay a minimum of $60,000 and a maximum of $150,000 to compensate the class.  If the minimum amount of $60,000 is not distributed after all claims are paid, Distributive Networks reportedly must release the remaining funds to a charity.

Over on the Salmonella Blog–yes, you read that correctly–a place we must confess we do not visit often, the law firm of Marler Clark announced that a class action lawsuit was filed yesterday against ConAgra on behalf of all individuals who became ill with Salmonella infections after consuming contaminated Peter Pan or Great Value peanut butter. The case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.  Marler Clark states that it has "been contacted by over 2,200 families who consumed peanut butter and are looking to pursue legal claims against ConAgra since the FDA announced the recall of ConAgra-manufactured peanut butter on February 14th.”

The proposed class includes all persons who:

(1) Purchased Peter Pan or Great Value peanut butter since May 2006 with a product-code beginning with 2111 imprinted on the lid; and

(2) As a result suffered either

(a) A lab-confirmed Salmonella infection, or
(b) Symptoms consistent with a Salmonella infection - i.e., fever, abdominal cramps, headache, and diarrhea - that otherwise fit the CDC case-definition for the subject outbreak.

According to this article, at least three lawsuits have been filed against ConAgra by people who say they became sick after eating the company’s peanut butter.   The article also says that according to ConAgra, its nationwide recall of all Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butter made at its Sylvester, Ga., plant will itself cost between $50 million and $60 million.  This estimate includes the costs of getting the product back and destroying it as well as the peanut butter itself.