In a case strikingly similar to a case that had been before the Supreme Court last term and that involves the same defendant and the same well-traveled objector, a unanimous panel of the Third Circuit vacated and remanded a district court’s approval of a Rule 23(b)(2) class action settlement that included cy pres payments but no payments to class members. Its decision addresses important questions arising from a controversial approach to class action settlements.
The reader may recall the case of Frank v. Gaos, in which the Supreme Court had granted certiorari to review a settlement that had a significant cy pres component but no money going to the class. We wrote about the case in our First Class Defense blog, and you can find that post here. The defendant in Frank v. Gaos was Google, and the case challenged Google’s use of “referral headers” in its search results that transmitted data about the user