A common feature in class action settlements is an incentive (or service) award for each named plaintiff—an extra payment above and beyond what they would receive.
Last year saw courts, particularly federal courts, continue their close scrutiny of class action settlements to ensure that they are fair and reasonable to class members, and do not.
The First Circuit recently reversed the District of Massachusetts’s approval of a settlement award that improperly lacked any subclasses within the 4.8-million-person putative class,.
More than two years ago, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Johnson v. NPAS Solutions, LLC, 975 F.3d 1244 (11th Cir. 2020) that incentive payments for lead plaintiffs in.
In a 7-4 split decision, the Eleventh Circuit declined to rehear en banc a panel decision issued in September 2020, holding a class settlement that included an incentive award to the.