A recent Legal Intelligencer story, “Class Action Against Rite Aid Settles for $ 20.9 Mil.,” reports that a federal judge in the Middle District of Pennsylvania has approved a $20.9 million settlement in a wage-and-hour class and collective action against Rite Aid Corp. U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III’s final approval in the consolidated cases of Craig v. Rite Aid settles 14 class and collective actions brought across the country against Rite Aid over allegations the drugstore chain improperly designated assistant store managers and co-managers as exempt employees not eligible for overtime pay.Out of the 14 consolidated class and collective actions, which touched upon 4,700 Rite Aid stores and created a 7,426-member class across 31 states, about 4,000 of the potential class members have filed claims against the settlement fund, according to lead plaintiffs’ counsel Seth Lesser of Klafter Olsen & Lesser in Rye Brook, N.Y. The class members will get paid out of the settlement based on the amount of hours worked during the applicable period. They are expected to get, on average, $1,845 per class member, Jones said in his opinion.
Plaintiffs counsel will share in about $6.7 million in attorney fees and nearly $275,000 in expenses. There were 12 law firms that worked on the case for a total of more than 14,000 hours since the case was filed in 2008. Klafter Olsen spent the most hours at 3,877, followed by Winebrake & Santillo, who billed 2,396 hours. The overall attorney fee request, which was about $1 million more than the lodestar calculation of the hours worked times the hourly rates, represents 32 percent of the settlement less the expenses, Jones noted.
In approving the attorney fees and costs, Jones noted class members stood to benefit from a $20.9 million settlement and no one objected to the fee award. The “incredible time commitment alone” of 14,000 hours weight in favor of the award as well, Jones said. So too did the fact that the case took four years and ran the gamut of litigation activities, he said.