According to the ABA Law Journal, Boston solo practitioner Evan Fray-Witzer, filed a class action lawsuit against Metropolitan Antiques, a New Jersey company, that had purchased the lawyers’ fax numbers and sent them faxes advertising estate sales. “The suit claims the faxes violated the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act” and, get this, ended when the class, which was made up mostly of Massachusetts lawyers, negotiated a “$1.8 million settlement with an auctioneer that sent them unsolicited faxes.”

I know this isn’t divorce related and you may be asking why you might care about this story, so I’ll give you the reasons I found it noteworthy enough for a post this morning:

1. The class, which was made up mostly of Massachusetts lawyers, negotiated a “$1.8 million settlement with an auctioneer that sent them unsolicited faxes.” - Can you believe it??? $1.8million!!! How many faxes could the auctioneer possibly have sent to each plaintiff lawyer to justify a $1.8 million settlement (which likely, doesn’t include the legal fees the auctioneer paid to its attorneys)?
2. Each of the members of the class are each eligible to receive up to $1,500 under the settlement. For those of you who are not lawyers, this means that each person who signed up as a plaintiff in the case based on the fact that they had received unsolicited faxes from the auctioneer gets up to $1,500 each! And, most persons who join a class action need only sign a paper or two swearing that they qualify. So each class member will receive $1,500 for um…a bad fax and signing a paper or two!!
3. “As lead plaintiff, Fray-Witzer will receive $15,000.” Mr. Fray-Witzer, whom I assume initiated the class action lawsuit, must have been REALLY TICKED OFF by the faxes he received in order to take on a class action lawsuit, which can be a HUGE undertaking unless you’ve filed so many in your career and have the process so streamlined that the toughest part is coming up with ideas about who to sue and why.
4. And now for the kicker: “The lead lawyers in the case, Matthew McCue of Framingham and Edward Broderick of Boston, will share $600,000 in attorney fees.” So I ask, “who are the real winners here??” The class members or the lawyers who spent their days working on the case? For the sake of argument, as an environmentalist who hates to see paper wasted, I admit the results of the class action may have a positive effect on the environment by reducing some waste if you still use old fashioned, non-electronic fax machines (say De minimis, which “is a Latin expression meaning about minimal things”). And, if you hate solicitors or telemarketers, I bet a few will think twice before faxing unwanted advertisements to you. That makes the environment and some of us winners, but that said, I can’t get away from the fact that so much time and energy and money was spent (bad for the environment) and our federal court system used, to fight unwanted faxes!!! I also can’t help but wonder if the entire action was simply a money making scheme for the lawyers who filed and pursued the action. I certainly hope not, but given the subject matter of the suit, I can’t help but wonder. (Of course, if any of the lawyers who profited from this action cares to comment, I welcome their response!)

So, for those of you who are in the legal process of getting divorced or separated, the moral of this rant story is: keep an eye on your lawyer and his or her staff to make sure they aren’t creating and billing you for unnecessary work. Find a lawyer, like myself, whose primary objective in working with you is to do what is necessary to resolve your case while keeping as much of your wealth in YOUR pockets, not the lawyers.

ps. Please ignore any typographical or grammatical errors as my morning tirades are not proofed for such technicalities.

pps.Maybe I should rename these posts “a lawyer’s morning rant” - now that I have that out of my system, back to work!