Opinion ID: 1042514
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Risks of Maintaining a Class Action

Text: Appellants argue that the district court heavily relied on the specter of decertification if the case were to proceed without explaining why the Supreme Court’s decision in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 131 S. Ct. 2541 (2011), posed a significant risk of decertification in this specific case. The district court concluded, after examining the facts of this case and recent jurisprudence interpreting Dukes, that there was a “substantial chance” that a motion to decertify the class would succeed were the settlement to be rejected, and that this possibility weighed strongly in favor of approval. It is unnecessary, and would be inappropriate, for us to conduct a purely hypothetical discussion of the ultimate merits of a potential decertification motion. Given defendants’ repeated statements that they will immediately move for decertification if the settlement is rejected, the large size of the class, the complicated and diverse claims asserted by plaintiffs, and the heightened legal uncertainty necessarily injected by significant recent Supreme Court authority 16 relevant to the propriety of class certification, however, we cannot find that the district court abused its discretion in finding that the class faced significant risks of decertification, that decertification would drastically reduce the chances of any member of the class achieving meaningful relief, and that the litigation risks attendant to these possibilities weighed heavily in favor of the fairness of a settlement under which plaintiffs achieved substantial benefits that (as in any settlement) fell short of what they might have hoped to achieve.6 In conclusion, the district court’s careful review of the settlement warrants the great deference we normally accord to trial court findings with respect to the fairness of class action settlements. The district court did not simply rubberstamp the settlement on the basis of boilerplate findings, but wrote a long and careful opinion after engaging in a serious process to air and examine the objections to the settlement. Appellants’ claims that the district court’s balancing of the Grinnell factors was inadequate boil down to the usual contention that the 6 One further issue, raised by appellants not in connection with the overall fairness of the settlement but in the context of their claims of inadequate representation, bears on but does not ultimately affect our analysis of the fairness of the settlement. That issue, which concerns a possible error in calculating the statute of limitations applicable to the class’s RICO claims, is discussed in note 9, below. 17 settlement did not get enough for the class. We find no fault in the district court’s rejection of that contention.