The Honorable John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has appointed LTL partner Caleb Liang to the Plaintiffs’ Leadership Development Committee in In re Class Action Settlement Administration Litigation, MDL No. 3162. The Court previously appointed Christopher Seeger of Seeger Weiss LLP as Plaintiffs’ Lead Counsel and David Boies of Boies Schiller Flexner LLP as Chair of the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee, with Bryan Aylstock, Kiley Grombacher, Eric Lechtzin, and David Stone also serving on the Executive Committee. The Court’s order noted the exceptional quality of the applicants.
MDL 3162 consolidates a series of putative nationwide class actions alleging that the four largest court-appointed class action settlement administrators in the country — Epiq, Angeion, JND, and Kroll — conspired with the two leading qualified-settlement-fund banks, Huntington National Bank and Western Alliance Bank, to divert interest and other compensation owed to class members on the billions of dollars in settlement funds held in qualified settlement funds each year. A parallel set of claims targets the administrators’ relationships with certain fintech companies, alleging that the administrators shared in undisclosed “breakage” revenue generated by digital payment cards that class members never redeemed. The administrator defendants are alleged to control more than 65% of the class action settlement administration market, and the bank defendants more than 80% of the settlement deposit market.
LTL represents plaintiff Nicole Rieger, whose complaint was among the first in the country to name Kroll Settlement Administration as a defendant, and whose action is one of those consolidated before Judge Bates by the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. LTL continues to prosecute the matter alongside the other plaintiffs’ firms serving in the court-appointed leadership.