Class Action

About 3,500 people will have about $10 million in personal debt forgiven by a collection agency, thanks to a settlement in federal court Friday that resolved a lawsuit over the agency's right to sue debtors in Maryland. As part of the settlement in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, an average $2,800 in debt will be erased for all 3,500 plaintiffs. Each of the two lead plaintiffs will receive a $2,000 payment as well. The settlement was reached between two Frederick men who led the class action suit — Jason Hauk and Freddy Velazquez — and LVNV Funding LLC, a Greenville, S.C.-based company that buys consumer debt from companies and often sues debtors to collect payment.

Online privacy issues jumped to the forefront Wednesday in Maryland as the attorney general challenged Google Inc.'s new privacy policy, a few days after a pair of Baltimore attorneys filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook Inc. for allegedly tracking users who ventured off its online social network. Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler sent a letter to Google that demanded a meeting in a week about the company's changes to its privacy policy, which gives the Internet company deeper access to users' data across its services, such as Gmail and YouTube.

A Harford County judge heard arguments Monday on whether a lawsuit over a vapor leak at an Exxon gas station in Fallston should proceed as a class-action case. The Peter G. Angelos law firm filed the lawsuit as a class action on behalf of about 150 families and businesses whose wells were contaminated by the gasoline additive MTBE. Lawyers for Exxon Mobil Corp. and the operator of the station contended that the plaintiffs should be required to file individual lawsuits. In arguing for class-action status, plaintiffs' lawyers said their clients shared a common interest in the leak, which residents learned about in 2004.

Another challenge by ground rent holders to Maryland's 2007 reform laws has been revived, with lease holders claiming that a state law unconstitutionally diminished the value of their property by making collection of payments costly and difficult to enforce. Attorneys for ground rent holders in a pending class action lawsuit say that a recent ruling by the Maryland Court of Appeals dooms the law being challenged, according to a recent motion. They are asking a judge in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court to invalidate the law. But in a newly filed motion, the attorney general's office says otherwise.

A Baltimore City Circuit Court judge yesterday certified as a class action a lawsuit against the city's cable television franchise that contends that the company's late-payment fees are a ruse to charge more for cable than regulations allow.Three plaintiffs represented by Washington attorney Philip S. Friedman said TCI Communications of Baltimore charges a $5 late fee if payment is not received within about 10 days of billing. Now that Circuit Judge Gary I. Strausberg has certified the lawsuit as a class action, all subscribers who have paid a late fee since November 1991 are plaintiffs in the suit.

ANY TIME a fund company is the target of a class action suit, investors can learn something. It doesn't matter whether the suit is fruitful or frivolous, there's always a lesson about how funds work and what investors need to know buried in these legal conflicts. This month, Van Wagoner Capital Management became the target of at least three class actions alleging that it misled investors about the value of shares in its Emerging Growth fund. No matter how the cases turn out, the entire saga should prompt investors to look more carefully into what they own. The lawsuits arose after a Wall Street Journal article last month questioned the way the fund valued "private placements," investments in companies that are not public and whose shares are not priced on any stock exchange.

A federal district judge in Atlanta yesterday converted an antitrust lawsuit against nine airlines into a class action that could benefit millions of domestic passengers and cost the carriers hundreds of millions of dollars.In decreeing a class-action suit requested by the plaintiffs, dTC Judge Marvin Shoob of U.S. District Court in Atlanta certified that all passengers who traveled between Jan. 1, 1988, and the present on the carriers were entitled to sue the companies as a group.The antitrust suit charges the airlines and the company that operates their computerized clearinghouse for listing airfares with conspiring to keep ticket prices artificially high at 23 hubs -- the airports to which the carriers funnel many of their connecting flights.

A federal judge in Baltimore ruled yesterday that Honda Motor Co. dealers can band together to sue the automaker for claims that the company conspired to send shipments of cars to those willing to pay bribes while punishing dealers who refused to take part in the kickback scheme.In his long-anticipated ruling, Chief U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz sided with Honda dealers who argued that the best way to pursue the largest commercial bribery case in American history was by creating a class-action law suit.

A federal judge has granted class action status to two categories of people in a civil suit that claims officers at Baltimore's Central Booking and Intake Center regularly and illegally detained certain arrestees too long and strip-searched people without cause. The ruling, issued Thursday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, opens the door for tens of thousands of people processed from May 2002 through April 2008 to join the suit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages. Central booking processes everyone arrested within city limits.

A federal judge in Los Angeles dealt a potentially stunning blow to Hollywood's system of "creative accounting" Monday as he certified a lawsuit over "JFK" that was filed by the estate of Jim Garrison as a class-action suit.If U.S. District Court Judge Robert Takasugi's ruling is upheld on appeal, the case is certain to become the mother of all Hollywood lawsuits, allowing thousands of actors, writers, directors and producers who feel they've been cheated out of net profits from motion pictures to join the plaintiffs as members of the aggrieved class.

The University of Maryland School of Law's consumer-protection clinic is trying to get key documents stricken from potentially hundreds of debt-collection cases over an issue more commonly thought of as a foreclosure problem — robo-signing. Midland Funding, which buys old consumer debts and sues to collect, filed affidavits signed by representatives who swore they had personal knowledge of the debts even though they did not, a federal court in Ohio found as part of an August class-action settlement.

About 3,500 people will have about $10 million in personal debt forgiven by a collection agency, thanks to a settlement in federal court Friday that resolved a lawsuit over the agency's right to sue debtors in Maryland. As part of the settlement in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, an average $2,800 in debt will be erased for all 3,500 plaintiffs. Each of the two lead plaintiffs will receive a $2,000 payment as well. The settlement was reached between two Frederick men who led the class action suit — Jason Hauk and Freddy Velazquez — and LVNV Funding LLC, a Greenville, S.C.-based company that buys consumer debt from companies and often sues debtors to collect payment.

A Maryland District Court judge dismissed more than 10,000 debt-collection cases against Maryland consumers Thursday, part of the terms of a settlement in a federal class action lawsuit against debt collector Midland Funding LLC. Chief Judge Ben C. Clyburn signed a motion to dismiss 10,168 cases of consumers who were sued in state court over unpaid credit card and other debt. Midland Funding, buyer and collector of debt, was accused in the U.S. District Court case of working as a debt collector without a state license.

Midland Funding LLC will drop more than 10,000 debt-collection cases against Maryland consumers under a class action settlement approved Wednesday in Baltimore federal court. The dismissed claims, mostly for unpaid credit card debt that Midland bought from creditors, total at least $10.2 million, according to a court document filed Wednesday by the plaintiffs. Consumers filed suit against Midland, a buyer and collector of debt, in September 2009, alleging "prolonged, illegal, and systematic abuse of thousands of Maryland residents.

Five former ESPN Zone employees filed a class action lawsuit Monday against the company, alleging it had violated federal standards for notifying and paying workers who lost their jobs when the Inner Harbor location closed in June. The federal lawsuit claims that ESPN Zone, owned by Walt Disney Co., did not provide laid-off workers the mandated 60 days' notice of termination under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, Act. The company has previously stated that it followed the federal regulations.

Revelations that attorneys at two Maryland firms had other people sign their names to foreclosure documents brought a rebuke Wednesday from the O'Malley administration, which called the practice a "potential example of further mishandling and mistreatment of Maryland homeowners. " Also on Wednesday, several borrowers' lawyers said they have filed a class-action suit against one of the law firms in federal court in Greenbelt. And attorney general offices across the country — including Maryland's — teamed up for a joint inquiry into nationwide reports of improper documentation used to foreclose on homeowners.

Rite Aid Corp. will pay shareholders $149.5 million in senior secured notes as the final installment to settle a nearly $200 million class action lawsuit, the company said yesterday. The Camp Hill, Pa., retailer, the nation's third largest drugstore chain, has already paid $45 million in cash toward the settlement, using liability insurance. To make the final payment, the company said, it amended a $1.9 billion secured credit facility. The consolidated class action suits alleged that Rite Aid's former management fraudulently misrepresented financial results for fiscal 1997, fiscal 1998 and fiscal 1999, which led to more than two years of losses and left the company on the brink of bankruptcy.

Maryland attorneys are spending thousands of dollars to sign up clients who might have had heart stents needlessly implanted by a doctor at St. Joseph Medical Center - cases some say could be clear-cut victories for patients and a steady income stream for their lawyers. The Towson hospital sent letters to hundreds of patients last month, telling them that the expensive stents in their arteries might have been placed there unnecessarily and under false pretenses. And almost immediately, attorneys began calling for clients online, on TV and in print.

When President Bush pushed the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) through Congress in 2005, environmentalists lamented the demise of the one of the last robust incentives for energy companies to develop meaningful safeguards against environmental disasters. At the time the bill was passed, one headline presciently read, "Erin Brockovich, drop dead." BP executives should be relieved to find that her legacy is still buried six feet deep in oil sludge. In recent weeks, Congress and the president have been roundly criticized for their slow response to the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in the Gulf that triggered one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.

An Anne Arundel County judge has certified ground lease holders as a class of plaintiffs in the legal challenge to the 2007 ground rent reform laws, opening up the possibility that thousands of ground lease owners could seek several hundred million dollars from the state if they win their case. The lawsuit claims the legislation made ground rent leases worthless, amounting to an unconstitutional seizure of private property for public use without compensation to the lease holders.