Returning to our One To Watch from last week:

Today U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis rejected the proposed class-action settlement between AmEx and various merchants based on the discovery last week that a lawyer for some of the merchants shared confidential documents with a rival attorney (who was also a friend and former colleague) for MasterCard in a parallel case. While the Court also expressed concerns with the substantive fairness of the settlement, it found it unnecessary to reach a conclusion on the merits because of the lawyer’s to rule on such merits because of the lawyer’s “improper…conduct” that “fatally tainted the settlement process.”

Noting that the opposing lawyer were in “frequent, possibly constant contact” about the settlement, and citing the “procedural unfairness” and “failure of adequate representation,” Judge Garaufis removed the merchants’ lawyer from the case, unfortunate news for the decade-old case.