Law360 (December 13, 2022, 6:33 PM EST) — Home Depot and others urged the Eleventh Circuit on Monday to upend an Alabama federal court’s approval of a $2.67 billion class settlement in multidistrict litigation against Blue Cross Blue Shield insurers, decrying the deal as favoring some employers and claimants over others and “immunizing horizontal restraints of competition.”
Each of the four separate briefs, in separate appeals moving forward together, took issue with a different aspect of the settlement resolving claims from individual and corporate insurance subscribers (but not health care providers) that comes with $626.6 million in attorney fees and an additional $40.9 million in costs for class counsel from Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, Hausfeld LLP and other firms.
Home Depot argued that the deal doesn’t adequately correct for allegedly anti-competitive abuses centered around policies that carve up parts of the United States between individual members of the BCBS network.