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Heartland Security Breach Class Action: Victims $1925, Lawyers $600,000
Fluffeh writes "Back in 2007, Heartland had a security breach that resulted in a 130 million credit card details being lifted. A class action suit followed and many thought it would send a direct message to business to ensure proper security measures protecting their clients and customers. With the Heartland case now over and settlements paid out and divided up, the final breakdown is as follows: Class members: $1925 (11 cases out of 290 filed were 'valid'). Lawyers for the plaintiff class action: $606,192. Non-Profits: around $1,000,000 (The Court ruled a minimum of $1 million in payouts). Heartland also paid its own lawyers around $2 million. Eric Goldman (Law Professor) has additional commentary on his Law Blog: 'The opinion indicates Heartland spent $1.5M to advertise the settlement. Thus, it appears they spent over $130,000 to generate each legitimate claim. Surprisingly, the court blithely treats the $1.5M expenditure as a cost of doing business, but I can't wrap my head around it. What an obscene waste of money! Add in the $270k spent on claims administration, and it appears that the parties spent $160k per legitimate claimant. The court isn't bothered by the $270k expenses either, even though that cost about $1k per tendered claim (remember, there were 290 total claims).'"
Or are you going to whine about the lack of a free market legal system?
...it should care about doing justice.They did their job.
You really don't care too much about $100k here or there... can I have it?
Most of them end up with the actual aggrieved getting $20 and the lawyers getting the six-figure payout.
This is sickening. No one in their right mind would argue otherwise. When lawyers make the rules (be it through lobbies or becoming lawmakers themselves), they favor their kind.
We're becoming more and more a society in which the do-nothings make out like bandits. That can't last much longer, can it?
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This lady opted out of a class action and took Honda to small claims court and won.
http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2012/02/03/234115.htm
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
It's called punishment. That's how punishment works all the time. You do no damage by speeding and you get a $200 fine. If you fight it you get to pay court costs, once again even if you did no damage. Are you to this planet? You act like you don't understand how punishment works. Did your mom never ground you as a kid? Did you never have to stay after school?
No one expects the lawyers to work for free but the lack of a true plaintiff in class action suits creates a situation where the lawyers can strike a deal best for them and not the client. What we need is the ability to class action sue lawyers for unfairly enriching themselves via class action suit...
Corporation that was "punished" finds ways to cost cut to make up for losses, which usually means jobs are lost. People wronged get a laughable amount of money. The lawyers make out like bandits though...but when don't they? There needs to be a better way of doing this.
the whole point of the justice system is to make the process so expensive that a company or individual will think twice the next time about committing a tort or not following the law
if there is no economic penalty then people will just break the law if it doesn't cost them anything
let's get rid of one of the last weapons the people have against corporate abuse
well other than actual weapons. Let's ask Marie Antoinette how that worked out.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Laws are written by lawyers, administered by lawyers, and judged by lawyers.
You can't understand laws without lawyers, you can't hope to defend yourself in court without a lawyer.
You do realize the system is set up to require a lawyer, right?
And no lawyer has any real stake in simplifying or reducing the input of lawyers.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
An inch is a mile
The time has come for the legal profession to become fully accountable to the public like the rest of the white collar professions. Lawyers should not sit on the Bar associations; businessmen, doctors, engineers, etc. should be the ones judging the professional conduct of lawyers. Lawyers have little to no education in these matters but deem themselves fit to judge every facet of how we do our work. Why is it then so outrageous to think that similarly intelligent and educated people from different fields should be the ones judging their ethics, billing practices, etc.?
I've gotten several letters asking me to join class action lawsuits, and I always send them straight to the trash.
These suits aren't going to result in any meaningful personal compensation for any harm or inconvenience you have suffered. The only time I would even consider participating is if I thought it was a case of such egregious bad behavior that the company needed to be punished.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Many a scorned spouse has declared in divorce court "I'll pay a lawyer before I'll pay you."
I personally haven't experienced abuse of my card details - so far as I know. But if I did, how could I tell who was responsible - especially when there are vast leaks like this? It seems like it would be more fair to have an industry-wide fund to compensate victims, which the leaking companies would pay into proportionately to the number of valid details leaked.
My parents lost ~$2.5 million in a ponzi scheme. They caught up with the guys who perpetrated it, and all of the clients were automatically added to a class-action suit against them preventing my parents from pursuing their own legal action. The class-action lawyers actually threatened to inhibit an individual case if my parents opted out.
Eventually, they won, and they recovered several tens of millions from these people to cover the ~$72 million he bilked the customers for. A percentage of investment that would be returned was decided on and it worked out to be about $800,000 for my parents. Well, because it was a class-action suit, the lawyers took nigh to 80% of that money. My parents were awarded about $35,000, and the lawyer kept the other $765,000 as their 'fee'.
Consider they did this to all of the plaintiffs. They ended up with OVER 80% of the people's money who were screwed out of their life savings, and ruined by these people. Several 80-year-old ladies who had their entire $60,000 retirement fund stolen, who were only returned $250 and subsequently went bankrupt and lost their health insurance. I haven't followed up, but I would be surprised if at least one of them hasn't experienced medical trouble or death as a result of this 'fee' keeping them from their just returns.
The lawyers did the same thing as the original criminals to these people. Who are the REAL criminals here?
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
"Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser -- in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough."
--Abraham Lincoln
The Justice system is another economic sector, subject to manipulation. And as such, lawyers treat it like any other business. The real world consequences for the in game chess pieces are just a necessary side effect.
You are posting on a case where the lawyers got $660K to the plantiff's $2K. Been a while since I took math, but that is more than 80%. The "but they worked on it for 5 years!" defense strikes me as unlikely, in that it didn't take 5 full years out of their lives - they were running other cases in the meantime. Every case will have substantial downtime waiting for investigators to complete investigations, legal response timeframes to expire, deliberate delays by one side or the other for some tactical reason, etc.
I was personally dragooned into a class action in which the settlement was: all the lawyers get money (pool of 1.5Mil or so), plantiffs get justice in the form of a company that no longer existed (sold out to competitor) fixing some of it's now meaningless paperwork. WooHoo!!!
I'm sickened by the pervasive knee-jerk reaction against lawyers I'm seeing in the comments here. The lawyers aren't the problem here. They prosecuted the case for five years, won the case, and still plainly lost money in the pursuit of justice. Greedy? No, you're just being willfully ignorant.
The real problem is the ruling that screwed over the victims and gave Heartland a slap on the wrist. 130 million credit card numbers stolen, 130 million identities stolen! And how much did it cost them? A pittance. And you assholes are complaining abou how greedy the lawyers are?
God forbid you ever need one when your identity is stolen due to your bank's negligence.
I doubt the 660k is a contingency fee; more likely it was actual fees ordered paid.