| Volume 142 Number 51 |
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The People’s Lawyer’s Tip of the Day
I just received $125 from the Equifax Settlement. Did you? If not, Click here for more.
Justice Department green-lights T-Mobile/Sprint merger
T-Mobile and Sprint have finally received approval from the Justice Department to move ahead with their $26 billion merger. The agency has been clear that its main goal is to preserve competition in the mobile industry. With that aim in mind, the DOJ said it wouldn’t sign off on the deal unless Dish Network replaced Sprint as the fourth major wireless carrier. Within the past few days, the companies agreed to sell some assets to Dish and Dish agreed to buy them. Dish will pay roughly $5 billion for Sprint and T-Mobile’s wireless assets, Bloomberg reported Thursday. Under the deal, T-Mobile and Sprint will be required to open up dozens of retail locations to Dish, as well as more than 20,000 cell sites. Dish will also get “a seven-year wholesale agreement allowing it to sell T-Mobile wireless service under the Dish brands.” If T-Mobile and Sprint fail to meet the terms of the agreement, the Justice Department and a handful of state attorneys general offices will file a lawsuit to block the merger. Click here for more.
Your Money
The House of Representatives passed the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act on May 23, 2019. If the bill, which has more than 20 sections, passes the Senate and is signed by the president, its impact could lead to shifts in retirement savings and planning. If the SECURE Act passes into law, you can expect: Click here for more.
For the Lawyers
Fee shifting attorney’s fees award not increased by “risk.” The Eleventh Circuit held that when a defendant agrees to pay class-action fees in a class-action settlement, in an amount to be determined by the district judge, separate from the fund set up by the settlement to compensate class members, the attorney's fee may not include a fee multiplier. Based on the holding of a Supreme Court case dealing with statute fee-shifting, the court stated: For this reason, not adjusting fees for risk is consistent with fee-shifting statutes. These statutes limit fees to prevailing parties, and adjusting fees for risk effectively subsidizes the attorney’s losing cases—a result at odds with the prevailing party requirement. Plus, enhancing for risk “would make the setting of fees more complex and arbitrary, hence more unpredictable, and hence more litigable.” For all of these reasons, the Supreme Court decreed that courts could not use a multiplier in statutory fee-shifting cases to account for risk. But this is a contractual fee-shifting case, not a common-fund case. As such, it is more closely related to the Supreme Court precedent governing fee-shifting statutes. And just because precedent is not technically binding does not mean we should blithely disregard it. To promote consistency in the law, we should adhere to precedent where its reasoning applies. Click here for more.