The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a $39.55 million class-action settlement last month between Monsanto and three plaintiffs who accused the company of mislabeling herbicide Roundup.
But an attorney representing an objector to the settlement ,which carved out $15 million to leftwing charities, is seeking review from the full court.
“This was a consumer class action over whether the product was adequately labeled for purposes of alleging consumer fraud without any claims of personal injury,” said attorney Ted Frank, a tort reform advocate renowned for objecting to consumer class action settlements.
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri approved the underlying settlement in May 2021, which awarded some $10 million or 25% to plaintiff attorneys. At the core of the appeal is a 2019 lawsuit filed by the plaintiffs who question the labeling of the active ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate.
“The settlement paid a small fraction of $39.55 million to class members and instead was giving money to a variety of left-leaning charities that most class members probably would not approve of and certainly the objector did not approve of,” Frank said.
The National Consumer Law Center, the National Advertising Division of the Better Business Bureau, and the Berkeley Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice are the third-party charities that will receive approximately $15 million from the settlement if the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals' June 29 decision stands.
“The new Eighth Circuit ruling contradicts existing precedent and so we’re seeking en banc review before the full Eighth Circuit,” Frank told the St. Louis Record.
In 2015, Frank won In re BankAmerica Corp. Securities Litigation in which the Eighth Circuit ruled against a much smaller sum of $2 million to third-party charities instead of to class members, even if it was difficult to find class members to give the money to.
“The Eighth Circuit, we believe in the Monsanto decision, disregarded or failed to correctly apply the Bank of America precedent, and we're asking the fall en banc court to resolve the discrepancy,” Frank said.
Anna St. John, the objector in Jones et al v St. John, is an attorney with Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute where Frank is a senior attorney and director of litigation.
“What's at stake is whether attorneys can be paid for basically breaching their fiduciary duties to their clients and diverting, in this case, an absurdly large sum of money to left-wing charities instead of to their clients,” Frank added. “You're not allowed to do that in any other context and we don't think you should be allowed to do that in the class action system.”