Category: In the News - Page 25

A group of UFC fighters on Monday sought preliminary approval of a $375 million agreement that would net many fighters over $1 million each and settle their Nevada federal court dispute with UFC over what they say is a history of suppressed wages.

The $375 million deal would resolve the case filed by fighter Cung Le in 2014, but leave the organization fighting similar accusations in a lawsuit filed by Kajan Johnson in 2021. The initial $335 million settlement would have resolved claims in both cases. However, U.S. District Judge Richard F. Boulware II rejected the idea, expressing concern about the dollar figure and that it would resolve lawsuits at different points in the legal process.

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If approved by the court, 35 fighters will get the highest payout of more than $1 million and around 100 will receive more than $500,000, Cramer said. The remaining fighters will net approximately $50,000 to more than $250,000. There are 1100 total fighters in the Le class.

More than 50 fighters submitted declarations voicing their support for the settlement Monday.

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The fighters are represented by Eric L. Cramer, Michael Dell’Angelo, Ellen T. Noteware, Patrick F. Madden, Najah A. Jacobs and Joshua P. Davis of Berger Montague, Richard A. Koffman, Benjamin D. Brown, Daniel H. Silverman and Daniel Gifford of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Joseph R. Saveri, Kevin E. Rayhill, Christopher K.L. Young and Itak Moradi of Joseph Saveri Law Firm LLP, Don Springmeyer of Kemp Jones LLP, Robert C. Maysey and Jerome K. Elwell of Warner Angle Hallam Jackson & Formanek PLC, and Crane Pomerantz of Clark Hill PLC.

A national investigative nonprofit on Monday lodged discrimination complaints against more than 200 California landlords and their representatives — including major real estate brokerages — alleging they illegally refused to rent to Section 8 voucher holders.

The Housing Rights Initiative filed the complaints, based upon an undercover investigation, with the California Civil Rights Department.

The nonprofit organization is asking the agency to look into penalties against the 203 companies and individuals, saying they violated a state law that makes it illegal to deny tenants solely because they’d pay with a voucher. It’s also lobbying for more state funding to adequately enforce the law, which the group and other advocates contend hasn’t been done since the rules took effect in 2020.

“There’s nothing more tragic than when a family gets … an opportunity to get a home and they can’t because real estate isn’t following the law,” said Aaron Carr, executive director of the Housing Rights Initiative. “It’s time for California to get tough.”

The Section 8 program, named after a section of the federal Housing Act, is one of the U.S. government’s most powerful tools to keep rental housing affordable and to fight overcrowding and homelessness.

Generally, tenants pay the equivalent of about 30% of their income on rent with the voucher covering the rest. Unlike public housing, the subsidy can move with tenants so that they can find housing with private landlords. But that’s easier said than done.

Households can spend years on waiting lists just to receive a voucher. When they get one, advocates say, landlords often refuse to rent to them under the disproven belief they’re more likely to be bad tenants, which can reflect negative stereotypes of poor people, as well as people of color, who make up a majority of Section 8 participants.

Amid a long-running housing crisis, California tried to stop those denials when it joined a handful of other states and passed a “source-of-income” law that makes it illegal to discriminate against tenants who pay with Section 8 and other subsidies. Types of discrimination include refusing to rent to such tenants at all or treating them differently in other ways, such as charging them higher security deposits.

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“If people who receive Section 8 … can’t get legitimate rental units, then they’re going to be unhoused,” said Smith, whose organization, along with the law firms Cohen Milstein and Handley Farah & Anderson, is representing the Housing Rights Initiative in its state filings.

Citgo will increase the value of pensioners’ retirements by $10 million to settle a class action alleging it shorted early retirement payouts by basing the allowances on outdated mortality tables that used data from the 1970s, according to filings in Illinois federal court.

Citgo Petroleum Corp. retirees entered a motion for preliminary approval Wednesday in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act suit. Pensioners filed the settlement agreement, preliminary approval motion, supporting memorandum and other documents after first reporting a deal to resolve the case in September.

Citgo has agreed to increase the value of retirees’ annuities by $10 million, calculated as additional present value added to their benefits under terms spelled out in the settlement agreement. The agreement also sets the maximum amount of attorney fees, expenses and class representative service awards at $4.75 million.

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The retirees are represented by Kai Richter, Michelle C. Yau, Daniel J. Sutter, Ryan Wheeler, Carol V. Gilden and Eleanor Frisch of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, by Rachana A. Pathak, Peter K. Stris, Victor O’Connell and John Stokes of Stris & Maher LLP, by Todd Jackson and Nina Wasow of Feinberg Jackson Worthman & Wasow LLP and by Shaun P. Martin of the University of San Diego Law School.

A Michigan federal judge on Thursday gave the final approval to a $25 million settlement to end claims from a class of Flint adults and businesses accusing a firm of failing to properly alert officials about the dangers of the city’s water, noting that the case took years to resolve because it involved complicated legal issues.

U.S. District Judge Judith E. Levy said the settlement with the class of about 45,000 plaintiffs and water firm Veolia North America is adequate and was reached through fair negotiations after about eight years of litigation, taking a moment to say she wished members of the public were better able to track case developments, because then they might have more understanding as to why the process took as long as it did.

“I wish the public had a closer ability to follow [this case] because it seems that I read articles in the media about how ‘it’s now 10 years and some months passed from the beginning of what’s called the Flint water crisis and why isn’t this done,’ and it turns out that the arguments are complex. The science is difficult. The number of people who were involved in this elevates the complexity of the process,” Judge Levy said.

The settlement received no objections and just four of the members opted out, the judge said.

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Ted Leopold of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, co-lead counsel for the class, told Law360 on Thursday that the decision was appropriate.

“We are very pleased with today’s proceedings and believe today is one more step towards closure of a very sad period in the life of the Flint community,” Leopold said.

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The class is represented by Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Pitt McGehee Palmer Bonanni & Rivers PC, Weitz & Luxenberg PC, Susman Godfrey LLP, Motley Rice LLC, the Law Offices of Teresa A. Bingman PLLC, Bronstein Gewirtz & Grossman LLC, the Law Offices of Deborah A. LaBelle, the NAACP, Goodman Hurwitz & James PC, Trachelle C. Young & Associates PLLC, Dedendum Group LLC, McKeen & Associates PC, the Law Office of Cirilo Martinez PLLC, Shea Aiello PLLC, Cynthia M. Lindsey & Associates PLLC, McAlpine PC and the Abood Law Firm.

As part of the proposed settlement, former female trainees can reapply to become agents and two outside experts will review the training program to make sure the evaluation process is fair.

The Justice Department agreed to a $22.6 million settlement for 34 women who sued the F.B.I., accusing the bureau of unfairly dismissing them from its agent training program because of their gender, according to court documents.

As part of the proposed settlement, the women can reapply to become agents and two outside experts will review the training program to make sure the evaluation process is fair.

“It was a long time coming,” said Paula Bird, 36, who was one of the women who filed the complaint in 2019. “They finally acknowledged there were problems, and they will hopefully do something about.”

The settlement still has to be approved by Judge Jia M. Cobb of Federal District Court in the District of Columbia.

The women, former recruits, filed the lawsuit, saying the F.B.I. had discriminated against them because of their gender and accusing the bureau of employing a double standard.

All the women had passed their fitness, academic and firearms tests at the F.B.I.’s facility in Quantico, Va. But they failed the last phase known as tactical training, which involves entering a house and confronting an armed attacker. The tactical training takes place at Hogan’s Alley, the F.B.I.’s mock town where hired actors portray terrorists and criminals.

The women accused instructors of treating women differently and running a “good-old-boy network” at the training academy.

“When male trainees do the same, they are praised for having a ‘command presence,’” the lawsuit said.

The women were dismissed from new-agent training between April 2015 and August 2024.

The complaints eventually prompted a review by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

In a report released in December 2022, the inspector general found that female trainees received a “disproportionate number of performance citations and were dismissed at rates higher than expected based on their share of the population.”

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“The F.B.I. would have been a much better agency if they had all of these women among their agents,” said Christine E. Webber, one of the lawyers who worked on the case.

“They showed they had what it takes to pass every objective test,” Ms. Webber said. “It was the one subjective test that led to their dismissal.”

The U.S. Department of Justice has agreed to pay $22.6 million to settle a lawsuit by 34 women who claim they were wrongly dismissed from the FBI’s agent training academy because of their sex, according to a court filing on Monday.

The settlement, which must be approved by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., would resolve a 2019 class action claiming the FBI, which is part of the Justice Department, had a widespread practice of forcing out female trainees.

The plaintiffs say that they were found unsuitable to graduate from the training academy even though they performed as well as, or better than, many male trainees on academic, physical fitness, and firearms tests. Some of them also say they were subjected to sexual harassment and sexist jokes and comments.

Along with the payout, the proposed settlement would allow eligible class members to seek reinstatement to the agent training program and require the FBI to hire outside experts to ensure that its evaluation process for trainees is fair.

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Christine Webber, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the settlement reflects “a genuine desire by the FBI to turn the page on the past history of discrimination in new agent training.”

The lawsuit accused the FBI of violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars workplace discrimination based on sex and other characteristics.

A Connecticut-based hedge fund that went bankrupt and owner George A. Weiss have agreed to pay $7.9 million to end an ex-worker’s suit alleging the company plowed its employees’ retirement savings into two substandard proprietary funds, according to filings Friday in Connecticut federal court.

The proposed class of participants in a 401(k) plan for employees of George Weiss Associates Inc. entered a motion for preliminary approval of the class action settlement in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act suit, disclosing the terms of the deal with GWA LLC and its owner, George A. Weiss.

The proposed class said in a memorandum in support of the motion for preliminary approval that the $7.9 million gross settlement amount to be paid by GWA LLC or its insurers to resolve the suit represented an “outstanding outcome for the class” that would result in an average gross recovery of about $40,000 per class member.

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The proposed class is represented by Michelle C. Yau, Daniel R. Sutter, Caroline E. Bressman and Jacob T. Schutz of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.

The UFC and its fighters have reached a revised settlement that upsizes the payout to $375 million, resolving a portion of their long dispute over wages and leaving claims from a similar class action unresolved, the organization said Thursday.

UFC, a subsidiary of TKO Group Holdings Inc., said in a statement it was responding to concerns raised by Nevada U.S. District Judge Richard F. Boulware II, who rejected the initial $335 million agreement that would have ended claims from the mixed martial arts fighters in two class actions accusing UFC of suppressing their wages. A spokesman for UFC declined to discuss more details about the judge’s concerns referred to in the statement.

The court must approve the most recent settlement.

“While we believe the original settlement was fair — a sentiment that was also shared by plaintiffs — we feel it is in the best interest of all parties to bring this litigation to a close,” Thursday’s statement says.

The court had expressed concern that the prior settlement included both the Le et al. v. Zuffa LLC case, filed in 2014 by fighter Cung Le and nearing trial, and Johnson et al. v. Zuffa LLC et al., filed in 2021 by fighter Kajan Johnson, which has not progressed as far. Judge Boulware also questioned the amount being offered to resolve the two cases.

The revised settlement resolves the Le case, and the Johnson case remains open.

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The UFC reached a new settlement in one of its antitrust lawsuits Thursday and hopes a judge will green-light it.

TKO Group — the UFC’s parent company — reached an agreement with the plaintiffs of Le v. Zuffa that will pay $375 million in the class action lawsuit in which former fighters allege the MMA promotion violated antitrust laws.

This amount exceeds the proposed $335 million settlement that Judge Richard Franklin Boulware II of the U.S. District Court of Nevada rejected in July.

Following the filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the UFC released a statement about the settlement in the Cung Le case. However, a second antitrust lawsuit led by former UFC fighter Kajan Johnson was not mentioned in the disclosure.

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The antitrust lawsuit dates to 2014, when Zuffa was accused of violating antitrust laws by paying UFC fighters less than they were entitled to and hurting other MMA promoters with those practices. The lawsuit also alleges that the UFC has gained an unfair advantage in the mixed martial arts industry through years of anticompetitive tactics and engaged “in a scheme to acquire and maintain monopsony power in the market for elite professional MMA fighter services.”

College student data company National Student Clearinghouse has agreed to pay nearly $10 million to exit multidistrict litigation stemming from the 2023 hack of Progress Software’s MOVEit file transfer tool.

The deal, outlined in a Massachusetts federal court filing Friday, would resolve claims in a November 2023 class action filed in Virginia federal court that lax security practices by National Student Clearinghouse and Progress Software allowed the ransomware cybercriminals to steal the Social Security numbers and personal information of about 1.5 million people.

National Student Clearinghouse, based in Herndon, Virginia, operates as a service provider to higher education clients and receives data from the schools.

The settlement would create a $9.95 million fund that would pay class members for two years of credit monitoring, plus either accounted losses from the breach of up to $12,500 or a cash payment of $100, which could be increased or decreased depending on the number of claims made.

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Evangelista is represented by Kristen A. Johnson of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, E. Michelle Drake of Berger Montague PC, Gary F. Lynch of Lynch Carpenter LLP, Douglas J. McNamara of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Karen H. Riebel of Lockridge Grindal Nauen PLLP, and Charles E. Schaffer.